The Biggest Challenge

Unquestionably, the biggest challenge a company faces is not failure, but success. If we look at the most spectacular swan dives and meltdowns of the last thirty years, most were at one time almost as spectacular successes. The giants of the 1960s – Xerox, Kodak, Sears, Waste Management, General Motors, and others – became the problems of the 1980s and 1990s. Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, Qwest, Adelphia, WorldCom, HealthSouth, UnitedHealth Group, and others that set records in the 1990s saw their names become synonyms for corruption and mismanagement in the early years of the twenty-first century. The financial meltdown of 2008 led to the greatest increase in bank failures since the FDIC began, from three in 2007 to 25 in 2008 and 140 in ....Table 4.1