Welcome to Business Blunders
“It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” – Warren Buffett
Everyone makes mistakes in business, but blunders require exceptional stupidity, utter recklessness, willful ignorance, unchecked egos, or a complete disregard for the rules.
A mistake in chess – a game that is often evoked as a metaphor in business – can be defined as merely missing the best move. But a blunder is a serious error, resulting in lost pieces, a decisive advantage for the opponent, or … you know … checkmate.
And it should have been foreseen.
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Foreseeing Blunders Will Make You Better In Business
I’ve spent decades as a financial journalist, covering blunder after blunder for newspapers including The Denver Post, the Houston Chronicle and The Wall Street Journal. I’ve lived through the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s, the financial crisis of 2008, the current pandemic-recovery era and many smaller financial disasters in between.
It’s always been yet another twist on an old scam – from multibillion-dollar accounting frauds like Enron to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, to the more recent crypto debacle by Sam Bankman-Fried. And while it’s just a handful of white-collar ne’er-do-wells who grab the major headlines, there are thousands of smarter schemers getting away with the same frauds. (Yes, one of the biggest blunders is getting caught!)
But Business Blunders is not just about fraud and ethical lapses. Critical errors in judgment arise from the overconfidence of plus-sized egos, the vanity of corporate narcissists and just plain ignorance of the facts. Power doesn’t just corrupt. It makes people do and say stupid things.
Take for instance, Elon Musk, the genius of our times. After running off advertisers at X, formerly Twitter, he said this in a May 2023 interview on CNBC:
“I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
Then in November 2023, he doubled down at a widely televised appearance and The New York Times Dealbook Summit:
"Don't advertise. … If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. … Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is."
And then in August 2024 he filed a lawsuit against advertisers for leaving en masse, posting this on X:
“We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war.”
Somehow, Musk can land a Space X rocket on its tail, but does he really believe that he can land advertisers by suing them?
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I have always been fascinated by the havoc blunders wreak on investors, lenders, associates, employees, customers and, ultimately, the people who make them. I’m left to wonder why people put up with the same follies over and over again.
Business blunders, as you will read, are both tragic and comic. Oh, what a horror to tally the losses. Oh, what a laugh to watch the mighty fall. Spotting them in advance could preserve your investments and your career.
– Al Lewis
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