Business Collapses

Big companies rarely die of one bad day. They die of a hundred small decisions that each looked reasonable in the meeting where they were made. A camera maker that built one of the first digital cameras and sat on it to protect its film business. A phone giant that owned the market and treated the touchscreen as a toy. An energy company whose accounts were so clever that its own executives stopped understanding them.

This section takes those collapses apart, piece by piece. We follow the money, the incentives and the people, and look for the moment when the end became likely, which is usually years before the headlines.

The patterns repeat. Success breeds the belief that the old formula will keep working. Bad news travels up the chain more slowly than good news. Targets meant to measure performance become the thing people chase instead. A culture that punishes the messenger ends up with no messengers. And a company that cannot imagine its own failure stops preparing for it.

These stories are not only about corporations. The same forces work inside a small business, a team, a family budget or a career: sunk costs that keep a bad project alive, overconfidence after a lucky win, and the comfort of doing what worked last time.

Read them as case files. Each one ends with the lesson we think travels best, the one you can take into your own work on Monday morning.