How They Blew It: the CEOs and Entrepreneurs Behind Some of the World’s Most Catastrophic Business Failures. (2010)

“These people did something remarkable – they built huge business empires worth  billions. Then they all did something unbelievable – they managed to lose it. They had it, now they don’t.

Jamie Oliver – former Daily Telegraph columnist, his work has also appeared in the Financial Times, the Independent, the Observer, London Evening Standard and a range of leading business magazines.

Tony Goodwin – successful HR entrepreneur

In the 1980s, popular business writers such as Peters and Waterman, Moss Kanter, and others suggested that those who would succeed as leaders of contemporary business in conditions of intense global competition required the courage to ‘bet the company’ on a regular basis and to be prepared to live with the consequences of losing such bets.

Jamie Oliver and Tony Goodwin, in their book How They Blew It: the CEOs and Entrepreneurs Behind Some of the World’s Most Catastrophic Business Failures, detail a number of individual case studies of how entrepreneurs and chief executives have lost vast sums of money for themselves or their companies (or both).

Publisher’s link: How They Blew It