Zombie Businesses: How to Learn from Their Mistakes

“For six years, my research team at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business carried out an extensive investigation of business breakdowns—not just missteps, but major business failures…At almost every one of the 51 companies we investigated, we were able to interview people who could give us firsthand accounts of what happened. In all we conducted 197 interviews of CEOs, former CEOs, other top executives, and midlevel managers.

We discovered that precipitous business failures are caused by four destructive patterns of behavior that set in, without anyone noticing them, well before a business goes under:
– Flawed executive mind-sets that throw off a company’s perception of reality
– Delusional attitudes that keep this inaccurate picture of reality in place
– Breakdowns in communication systems that were developed to handle potentially urgent information
– Leadership qualities that keep a company’s executives from correcting their course”