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In business, success and failure are two sides of the same coin. PR departments are focused on promoting your successes, while the media are more prone to cover failures. Neither of them, however, is very effective at analyzing and helping you understand why some ideas, operations and ventures go according to plan and others go off course. But in the lifetime of any company and in the career of any top decision-maker, both take place. It is imperative for businesses to take a critical, systematic and honest look at the causes of success and failure as this knowledge is priceless in trying to be more successful.
A business keynote speaker and management professor at the Tuck School of Business, Sydney Finkelstein knows everything about it. Defying the expectations of the academic community focused on dissecting success, he pursued his idea of investigating why companies do badly. It turned out that, under pressure of the media and for various other reasons, people tend to believe that businesses go wrong because people at the top are incompetent, unintelligent or crooked. In fact, these are nothing but common myths surrounding the world of executive failure.
Finkelstein identifies four major causes of companies or their ventures collapsing: misguided strategic thinking, delusion, inadequate oversight or destructive managerial habits. What it means for companies is that there is a limited set of mistakes its leaders can make while running them. Having a structured understanding of what tends to lead to failure can help corporations and their executives to be more alert and avoid courting trouble. It would be unwise of any business keynote speaker to argue that there is a sure way to remain on track to success, but an early warning system against first symptoms of impending meltdown does exist.
Understanding business failure is essential to becoming successful in the long run. Most companies cannot afford to go though a debacle of their own, which is why learning from the mistakes of other executives is so important. Hiring an experienced business keynote speaker with a deep knowledge in this field, such as Sydney Finkelstein or Thomas Davenport, to run leadership training or executive training in your company can strengthen its defenses, put it firmly on a course to success and save a messy corporate disaster.
Contact Business Educators today. It is a network of outstanding US business thought leaders, affiliated with the best schools around the country. Interact with and book the right business keynote speaker for your company or business event directly on our online platform.
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