Book Review: "The Ten commandments of Business Failure" by Donald Keough

I normally don't read much stuff on management and general leadership per se. I just happened to come across this title on Amazon while generally browsing. The fact that the foreword is by Warren Buffett and Donald Keough was the president of the Coca-Cola company made me go through some reviews and so I picked this book up.

To start with, this is actually a pretty slim volume of around 200 pages and the author who has had a long illustrious career with 'The Coca-Cola company' gives us 11, yes not 10, commandments of business failure. He then proceeds to take each in a separate chapter to explain what executives must do to fail in businesses. Needless to say, each of the 11 chapters is peppered with business examples based on Coke and other businesses.

The plus points of this book is that fact that its size and scope implies simplicity. Simplicity of a very pleasant kind where the reader can go through the book pretty quickly and have a good time reading the book. It's like your old uncle who has just retired from work explaining to you what good businesses are all about !

The average business school student or manager who has tracked world business events will, probably, have already heard about half of the anecdotes with the most famous examples being that of the New Coke fiasco (obviously), IBM's failure to figure out PCs, Xerox not capitalising on its R&D etc. But as a part of this book, they don't come across as jarring or repetitive. For the New Coke fiasco, for example, the author gives some good examples of customer feedback.

On the flip side, all the commandments come across as simple management platitudes which one has read across in almost every leadership article or book (of course, leadership books will all have the same reasons - there is no secret sauce).

To just sum up, this is a nice little breezy book on business and gives a wide range of business commandments to follow (actually). Plus the simplicity and the examples mean that while this is not a great book, it definitely is a good one.