The Book

Thousands of New Zealand businesses are liquidated every year. Many thousands more simply disappear for reasons we may never know. All these failures have huge impacts on those involved. The large corporate failures like South Canterbury Finance, Solid Energy and Pumpkin Patch cost hundreds of millions of dollars and impacted the careers and lives of thousands.

Learn why these businesses failed and more importantly what we might learn. This book looks intimately at the human element of business failures as well as the traditional triggers for failure - uncontrolled growth; poor governance; fraud; failure to manage taxation, high debt. But the more fundamental aspect of failure is the role of irrational emotional human beings - something we all are. 

We can’t separate business from being human. We can’t remove emotions from our decisions. We have subconscious biases we don’t recognize - all these realities of being human make us who we are but can also get us and our businesses into serious strive.

Take a journey through hundreds of case studies and stories about failed businesses and take a journey through the irrational human mind that contributed so much to these failures.