How They Blew It: The CEOs and Entrepreneurs Behind Some of the World's Most Catastrophic Business Failures

by Jamie X. Oliver, Tony Goodwin

How They Blew It is a series of eye-popping tales of entrepreneurs and business leaders who went from corporate gurus to financial disaster zones in rapid and humiliating fashion. Full of surprising details and mind-blowing sums of money, it looks at the characteristics of these leaders and the fine line between hero and zero. How They Blew It is about the people at the heart of these business catastrophes. It is about what drives them to succeed and then to fail. It is a compelling examination of the rights and wrongs of each case and it seeks to get into the minds of the people behind the business disasters and ask "Why the hell did they do that?" By examining how business ventures can go so badly wrong, you can learn to avoid those mistakes in the first place.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Jamie Oliver has interviewed some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs and business leaders, including Howard Schultz, Sir Martin Sorrell, Charles Dunstone, James Dyson and Stelios. He has interviewed a wide range of people in his 12-year journalistic career, including gravediggers, prostitutes, bishops, diamond dealers and venture capitalists. He has written three previous books, about success, death and sex, and spoken widely on each subject to varying degrees of bewilderment.

Former Daily Telegraph columnist, his work has also appeared in the Financial Times, the Independent, the Observer, London Evening Standard, Marie Claire and a range of leading business magazines.

Reviews

[Loy Machedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loy Machedo’s Book Review – How they Blew it by Jamie Oliver & Tony Goodwin

Who doesn’t want to be a billionaire?
Almost every person on the planet who has been introduced to the world of positive thinking, day-dreaming or worse – people who read and believe self-help delusional books like ‘The Secret’ by the Rhonda Byrne or timeless classics like ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill – everyone would want to be a billionaire.

The perks are amazing.
The choices are never-ending
The feeling is promising.

May be that is why everyone you meet, including the lazy colleague in the office who can never come to work on time, let alone be disciplined in his job, all languish in the oasis of one day becoming a rich-self-made business man. A chorus chanted by even the young, stupid and inexperienced.

Yet, no one every fathoms stress, court proceedings, bankruptcy, solitary confinement, death threats or worse denouncement by the world. No one.

Here is an amazing book that brings to life, the reality, the actuality and the finality a few greats of our time underwent that lead from dust, to the heights of envy and then back to dust.

The book covers the lives of 16 well known entrepreneurs namely:
1. Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom who lost US$180 billion with 20,000 people losing their jobs.
2. Christopher Foster, the British Millionaire who killed his own wife of 21 year and his 15 year old daughter, igniting 200 gallons of fuel to destroy his house, before killing himself
3. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the richest people in the world who lost everything after he committed the unthinkable - clashing heads with Vladimir Putin
4. Jon Asgeir Johannesson of Iceland, a Billionaire who not only lost everything but destroyed Iceland by burring it in an avalanche of 50 Million Euros debt
5. Reuben Singh of United Kingdom whom Sunday Times dubbed as the ‘British Bill Gates’, whom the Guinness Book of World records crowned ‘the world’s youngest self-made millionaire’, whom every single whose who of UK showered his with praise, accolades and respect was infact…..a fraud?
6. Tim Power, whose personal close knit family wealth was close to 2.5 Billion pounds, lost billions and ended up behind bars?
7. Dick Flud. US$613 Billion wipeout. Lehman Brothers. Need I say more?
8. Guy Naggar & Peter Klimt, having assets worth billions with more than 500 directorships, to losing it all.
9. Adolf Merckle, who in 2007 was worth US$12.8 Billion, and who on 5th January 2009 killed himself.
10. Boris Berezovsky, the right hand of the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin who had all the power and money in the world, and then ended with nothing
11. Zhou Zhenqyi who was richer than all 1,299,999,989 Chinese people and then lost everything and ended in prison
12. Mark Goldberg, who in 1998 was a multi-millionaire and with one decision & within 18 months went into a multi-million debt.
13. Ken Lay, best buddy of President George Bush. Don’t know who? Let me say the magic word – US$ 63.4 Billion assets wipeout. US$ 11 Billion loss to investors. Welcome to Eron.
14. Kevin Leech – Jersey’s first billionaire and then bankrupt.
15. James Cayne, the billionaire who would take US $1,700 trip by helicopter every afternoon, just to play golf with his friends, finally whose legacy went into pieces
16. Finally, Robert Tchenguiz who magically lost 1 billion pounds with ease.

This book has all these stories – short, sweet and succinct.

I loved this book and could not put it down. Every chapter by itself takes you through the life, dreams, desires and death of these legends.

I believe everyone should and must read this book. In fact if you are ambitious, ensure you have a copy of this book kept on your desk or gift it to anyone whom you feel is ready to run the race to the Billionaires club.

In the end, one sentence in the book will outshine everything else – Ones ability to make money does not equate to intelligence or being wise.

Beware.

Overall rating
A very enjoyable book, very easy to read and very addictive in its structure and story telling ability.
A respectable 9 out of 10.
I loved this book.

[Daniel Hillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant book that captures a separate story each Chapter highlighting some of the catastrophic and at times unfortunate and sad circumstances behind some of the most successful entrepreneurs.

Very good book for picking up and reading as and when i.e a Chapter at a time. My only criticism that prevents it being a 4 would be the lack of emphasis on each of the stories and dug deeper into exactly why they failed and the lessons that could be learnt. Whilst there was a summary it only seemed to scratch the surface before moving on to the next Chapter.

[Sawan Suba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Studying failures help us envisage the complexity of the business world - personal, public, political etc. The writer has done an appreciable job at collecting facts and presenting a narrative that makes it easy to understand these complexities. I just wish there was some way of removing the discontinuity between the chapters.

[Ana Mardoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

How They Blew It / 978-0-749-46065-5

Half mini-biography, and half "where are they now" expose, "How They Blew It" provides quick and interesting "start-to-finish" looks at 16 major companies and the CEOs and entrepreneurs that, basically, ran them into the ground with varying degrees of criminal intent and enthusiasm.

Of the 16 companies featured here (and the 17 entrepreneurs at the helms), each gets about 10-15 pages each, as the authors lightly trip over the rise and fall of the companies, and covers the personality quirks and final resting place of the leaders of the ill-fated company. The overall effect is very light-hearted and superficial - the sort of thing you would get from a "where are they now" magazine article revisiting the crash of the company in retrospect a few years after the fact.

While this is a perfectly valid approach, it does ensure that the vignettes never really rise above a mini-biography/documentary level. Very little effort is put into actually analyzing the behavior of the entrepreneurs who "blew it", and almost zero effort is put into analyzing why so many people - governments, news organizations, and even auditors - were willing to help perpetuate what, in many cases, amount to bald-faced fraud. When the book does attempt to provide "analysis", the effort is painful to behold: the authors flounder frequently into stale gender stereotyping, asserting that men have more "sheer ego" and that, "there appears to be a desire in men, as opposed to women, to leave their DNA footprint on the world"; women, on the other hand, are characterized here as having a "stable business" approach that will "support her and her family".

This stale, tired approach to gender differences in businesses prevents any kind of meaningful look at the societal pressures and impetuses towards business fraud, instead pushing for weak, easy answers - these men, according to the authors, "blew it" simply because they had a bit too much of the Y chromosome. Later, when discussing the Iceland bank crash, the authors will also wonder if a certain entrepreneur's success was due to "similarities with Iceland's Viking past, with mystical powers at work." And, once again, we are reminded in full force of a magazine fluff piece.

For what it is, "How They Blew It" is not a bad piece of work. There are a lot of obscure businesses here - not just the Enrons and the Lehman Brothers of the business world - so if you're desperate to bone up on broken businesses, or if finance is your hobby and you've missed some of these scandals in the last few years, then this collection will serve as a handy refresher on the subject. For a "just the facts" whiz through, "How They Blew It" certainly does the job, and is well written outside of the occasional painful dip into whimsy and speculation, but if you're looking for a more in-depth interpretation on the subject, you will be disappointed.

Basically, "How They Blew It" will answer the superficial "how" by showing you all the houses, ranches, boats, and other luxuries that the entrepreneurs "blew it" all on... but it won't answer the deeper "how" of why they were allowed to get away with it for so long, and how no one ever stepped in to stop them until it was too late.

NOTE: This review is based on a free Advance Review Copy of this book provided through NetGalley.

~ Ana Mardoll

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reach back into your memories of your high school English class and remember hubris, that overwhelming, overblown feeling of pride and self-confidences, that the gods enjoy punishing, usually with maiming, sometimes with thunderbolts. How They Blew It: The CEOs and Entrepreneurs Behind Some of the World's Most Catastrophic Business Failures catalogs some of the most astonishing business failures of the past decade and hubris seems to be the principal cause of many of these failures. That and losing track of what business, exactly, their companies were in.


From entrepreneurs that ran afoul of their former business/government allies (Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky and Zhengyi) to CEOs who were eaten for lunch when the banks tanked (Johannesson, Fuld and Cayne), and including the tragic ends of two CEOs (Merckle and Foster) who took their lives--and the lives of his family, in the case of Foster--when their investments fell apart, How They Blew It is an international rogues' gallery of business leaders whose investments just seemed to implode. One of the conclusions that the book reaches is that the failed business leaders were too smart for their own good and tended to overlook what their delegates were doing or to keep their eye on the business bottom line. As a statement about how to stay focused on the core business, How They Blew It lays out a case for looking to the future while also concentrating on the present.


Though most of the cases are laid out in a lurid, breathless fashion, and most of the sources cited are business periodicals with no references to books written about the events, the book does also remind the reader that entrepreneurs can be very successful, and even if they don't achieve dazzling fortunes, entrepreneurs account for a significant number of jobs and create wealth, even on a small scale. This book would be useful to librarians who are trying to get a handle on some of the biggest business scandals and debacles of the past decade but it would also provide a starry-eyed entrepreneur with a warning about reaching too far with one hand while failing to hold on to a firm base with the other. Which is the point about stories about hubris--confidence based in actual achievement is good, but excessive pride is punished. Thankfully only in stories is it punished with thunderbolts.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Broad reports on 17 entrepreneurs who blew up their businesses

In recent years, serial entrepreneurs and celebrity CEOs have become rock stars, not just of the corporate world but also of society at large. People love to learn about big business mavens, what they do, where they live, what they drive, where they party and who their spouses are. Even more darkly compelling are the bad boy wheelers and dealers who have dramatically blown up their firms through financial chicanery (almost exclusively a male activity; thus, few bad girls of business exist). In this timely yet disturbing book, journalist Jamie Oliver and recruitment expert Tony Goodwin present a rogues’ gallery of entrepreneurs and CEOs who have disgraced themselves and destroyed their companies, often trashing the savings of multitudes of innocent bystanders. Some of these guys didn’t blow it, exactly, in that they went home plenty rich – but their firms still suffered on their watch. The authors lightly, charmingly depict the lives of these corporate desperados, offering lessons other leaders can draw from their stories. While morbidly fascinating and a bit sensational, the book sometimes loses its edge as it catalogs deals negotiated, firms bought, bad strategies enacted and millions lost. Nonetheless, getAbstract quite enjoys this voyeur’s look at how these big shots imploded and how to avoid making the same mistakes.

To learn more about this title, check out the following web page: https://www.getabstract.com/summary/1...

[Prapti Patel · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're tired of reading the same old success stories of business miracles and eureka! moments, try How They Blew It by Jamie Oliver and Tony Goodwin. A refreshingly new perspective on what it means to be a success- and a failure- this book charts the stories of sixteen business tycoons with unimaginably powerful and wealthy empires which went kaput in spectacular fashions.

The book does not have a mocking or savage tone to it, quite the contrary,and serves as a thoughtful reminder of all that can go wrong even with the smartest of people.

The constant torrent of facts and figures coupled with the plain language that it is written in tend to make the book a dry read but then again, it is not a book to be finished in one sitting.

All in all, an enlightening read and an interesting break from the regular How-To-Succeed-At-XYZ books that flood the market with determined regularity.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book absolutely fascinating. The author profiled 16 entrepreneurs and detailed their rise and fall. I liked that each chapter was roughly 10 pages long. It was the perfect length. The book moved at a brisk pace. The entrepreneurs profiled were all men, but from different countries. I must admit that I was only familiar with a couple of the men featured, but the other profiles were just as compelling. I could not put this book down. The only negative comment I have is that since the author is from the UK, some of his references, which I am sure would make sense to his fellow countrymen, were lost on me. Other than that, this is truly a great read.

[Bart Van Loon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was not very impressed by this book. It's little more than a dry listing of public events surrounding once super rich CEOs and entrepreneurs who ultimately failed and there's a constant focus on money as a measurement on having achieved success.

The one lesson to be learned from this book is: do not upset Vladimir Putin.

[Jeff Aldrich · Rating 1 out of 5]

Great subject - very poor writing. It was like they had cut and pasted from newspaper clippings and magazines. No depth, no insight. Don't waste your time or space on this piece of fluff journalism.

[Savio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly books come out telling you about success of people,
this book shows how successful people are still human and prone to mistake,

A book about 16 entrepreneurs who made it and then blew it.
good read, easy language too

[Amr Handy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book has a good collection of cases but unfortunately with no analysis or in depth information. The recommendations at the end are not useful, rather they are superficial and cliche. It would have been more valuable to analyze the cases.

[Gareth Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tales of events and issues. Thin analysis and conclusions - wide beam coverage.