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Thursday, July 24, 2008
Can you add commandments for business failure?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Longtime Coca-Cola President Don Keough, who retired from that job in 1993, has been observing the ups and downs of business for 60 years.
Keough didn’t want to fill the shelves with another “How to Succeed” book, partly because he gets nervous talking about success. But he sure does have a recipe for business failure with his Ten Commandments. His book appears in bookstores today.
From your experiences with business (either as an executive, employee or consumer), do you agree with Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure?
What commandments would you add to Keough’s Ten Commandments?
Here are Keough’s:
1: Quit Taking Risks
2: Be Inflexible
3: Isolate Yourself
4: Assume Infallibility
5: Play the Game Close to the Foul Line
6.: Don’t Take Time to Think
7: Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants
8: Love Your Bureaucracy
9: Send Mixed Messages
- Be Afraid of the Future
And the Bonus Commandment:
11: Lose Your Passion for Work —- for Life
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Don Keough’s How-to-fail book exudes decades of success
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Do you want to be a failure in business?
If so, Don Keough has written the right book for you: “The Ten Commandments for Business Failure,” appearing in bookstores today.
Keough, who retired in 1993 as president of the Coca-Cola Co., has remained active in the business world. He is the non-executive chairman of New York-based Allen & Co.; he rejoined Coca-Cola’s board four years ago; and he is a director of Warren Buffett’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.
And over the years, Keough has served on the boards of McDonald’s, the Washington Post Co., Home Depot, H.J. Heinz Co. and the University of Notre Dame.
All those various roles have given Keough insights on the pitfalls in the business world, which he is now sharing with the rest of us.
The theme of the book was born when Keough was asked to give a speech 20 years ago to a convention of customers in Miami. He was asked to talk about the secrets of success, but he did not feel he could provide a set of rules or guidelines to guarantee success in business.
Instead, he delivered a “little speech” called “Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure.” It was a theme he continued to explore over the past two decades. And in 2006, fellow Coca-Cola director Herbert Allen (Allen & Co.) finally persuaded Keough to share them with the prestigious group of executives meeting at the annual Sun Valley conference.
“That’s a pretty heavy audience,” Keough said. “People started to really pressure me (to write a book). There was Herb Allen, Warren Buffett. I was cornered.”
Sitting in his office at the Galleria before his book came out, Keough, 81, almost seems embarrassed about his latest venture.
“For a man my age to write a book is kind of weird,” Keough said.
But all weirdness goes away when Keough starts talking about the lessons he’s learned in his six decades in the business world.
Keough believes that people and companies are defined by failure. He talked about growing up in the 1920s, his house burning down when he was just a young boy, and his father losing everything during the Great Depression and having to start his life over at 40.
“Success was not a word that was in your head,” Keough said.
Keough said that in his career he has followed several of his Ten Commandments. One of the best known “failures” that Coca-Cola experienced was the introduction of “New Coke.” When the sweeter Coke was introduced, a consumer uprising cried out for the old Coke, which was later reintroduced as “Coca-Cola Classic.”
So which commandments did that experience fall into? Keough didn’t hesitate: No. 4, Assume Infallibility, and No. 7, Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants.
“We could have said: ‘No,’ ” Keough said of Coca-Cola’s executive team. “It could have been stopped in my office. It could have been stopped in (Chairman and CEO) Roberto’s (Goizueta) office. Once you get a process started in a big company, it’s hard to stop. The drum began to beat. I was a skeptic about the thing, but you get swept up in it.”
But Coca-Cola’s executives did something few executives do. “What we decided to do with New Coke was admit we made a mistake,” Keough said, adding that the company’s message to customers was: “We don’t own this brand. You do. You made it very clear you want the old formula.”
That action turned into a public relations coup so that “our image went through the roof.” Some people even wondered whether that had been the plan all along.
To that, Keough said: “We aren’t that smart, and we aren’t that dumb.” And then he thought about it for a minute. “I think that will go on my tombstone.”
Keough did talk about his age. At one point, he said: “My time is short. You look at someone my age, and you tell them: ‘Don’t buy green tomatoes.’ “
But his business savvy is still much in demand. Asked how long he will continue to serve on Coca-Cola’s board, Keough responded: “I resign every year. I came back because I was asked to come back. I have, and will do, anything the company wants me to do.”
The same is true for his relationship with Herb Allen and Warren Buffett. Both men play prominent roles in the book in explaining the opposite of Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure.
In fact, I asked Keough whether one could take the opposite of each of his Ten Commandments to come up with Ten Commandments for Success.
Again, Keough became uncomfortable talking about success.
In the book’s introduction, he actually writes: “After a lifetime in business, I’ve never been able to develop a set of rules or a step-by-step formula that will guarantee success in anything, much less in a field as dynamic and changing as business.”
Keough can’t help but undersell himself as being out of date or clueless about success.
But on his desk, there’s one of the original iPhones that he and his son will update with new software.
“If I want to know what’s happening with Coke stock, I just look at my I-Phone,” said the ever current Keough. Then he can’t help himself. Xerox could have had that technology. And then he added: “Bill Gates wishes he had it.”
IF YOU FOLLOW THESE, YOU WILL FAIL
Don Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure
1: Quit Taking Risks
2: Be Inflexible
3: Isolate Yourself
4: Assume Infallibility
5: Play the Game Close to the Foul Line
6: Don’t Take Time to Think
7: Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants
8: Love Your Bureaucracy
9: Send Mixed Messages
10: Be Afraid of the Future
And the Bonus Commandment:
11: Lose Your Passion for Work —- for Life
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