2020 is turning out to be one big screwup after another. If you are lucky, you can just shrug off these failures and have a good laugh about them. But if you are affected, or responsible for these failures, then this is not a laughing matter.
How do business leaders manage their organisations to minimise a catastrophic failure? Almost by definition these failures don't happen very often so you don't know if you are doing the right thing or not. But you do know the costs of getting things wrong can be huge.
Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik look at failure from a systems level. How do different organisations approach and avoid the unthinkable. How did a Starbucks social media campaign go wildly out of control? How did the wrong movie get the Academy Award for Best Picture? And how did a piece of code bring down an entire financial trading company.
Their book Meltdown contains a serious warning for all of us. That because companies, economies and societies are becoming more complex and inter-related, the potential for catastrophic failures is increasing. We just don't know it yet. But there are things that we can do to minimise those risk.