Forced To Fail

Caldas and Bankston provide a critical, dispassionate analysis of why desegregation in the United States has failed to achieve the goal of providing equal educational opportunities for all students. They offer case histories through dozens of examples of failed desegregation plans from all over the country. The book takes a very broad perspective on race and education, situated in the larger context of the development of individual rights in Western civiliztion. The book traces the long legal history of first racial segregation, and then racial desegregation in America. The authors explain how rapidly changing demographics and family structure in the United States have greatly complicated the project of top-down government efforts to achieve an ideal racial balance in schools. It describes how social capital—a positive outcome of social interaction between and among parents, children, and teachers—creates strong bonds that lead to high academic achievement. The authors show how coercive desegregation weakens bonds and hurts not only students and schools, but also entire communities. Examples from all parts of the United States show how parents undermined desegregation plans by seeking better educational alternatives for their children rather than supporting the public schools to which their children were assigned. Most important, this book offers an alternative, more realistic viewpoint on class, race, and education in America.

According to Robin Higham and Stephen J. Harris, "Flight has been part of the human dream for aeons, and its military application has likely been the dark side of that dream for almost as long." In the twentieth century, this dream and its dark side unfolded as the air forces of the world went to war, bringing destruction and reassessment with each failure. Why Air Forces Fail examines the complex, often deep-seated, reasons for the catastrophic failures of the air forces of various nations. Higham and Harris divide the air forces into three categories of defeat: forces that never had a chance to win, such as Poland and France; forces that started out victorious but were ultimately defeated, such as Germany and Japan; and finally, those that were defeated in their early efforts yet rose to victory, such as the air forces of Britain and the United States. The contributing authors examine the complex causes of defeats of the Russian, Polish, French, British, Italian, German, Argentine, and American air services. In all cases, the failures stemmed from deep, usually prewar factors that were shaped by the political, economic, military, and social circumstances in the countries. Defeat also stemmed from the anticipation of future wars, early wartime actions, and the precarious relationship between the doctrine of the military leadership and its execution in the field. Anthony Christopher Cain's chapter on France's air force, l'Armée de l'Air, attributes France's loss to Germany in June 1940 to a lack of preparation and investment in the air force. One major problem was the failure to centralize planning or coordinate a strategy between land and air forces, which was compounded by aborted alliances between France and countries in eastern Europe, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia. In addition, the lack of incentives for design innovation in air technologies led to clashes between airplane manufacturers, laborers, and the government, a struggle that resulted in France's airplanes' being outnumbered by Germany's more than three to one by 1940. Complemented by reading lists and suggestions for further research, Why Air Forces Fail provides groundbreaking studies of the causes of air force defeats.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

The Treasury Committee considers the issue of the existence of a type of financial firm, or firms which are "too important to fail" - so integral to the financial system that it was necessary for governments to bail them out during the banking crisis. The report concludes that the actions governments had to take to ensure financial stability have resulted in a market which operates on the assumption that systemically important firms will be rescued if necessary, and radical reform is needed. The report looks at the range of reforms currently under consideration, and assesses them against the objectives of an orderly banking system; protecting the consumer, protecting the taxpayer, setting an appropriate cost of doing business and providing lending to the economy. It emphasises that successful reform would transfer risk away from Government and back into the banking sector. The report is doubtful about how far evolutionary reform can make sufficient changes. The government has ruled out structural reforms such as narrow banking, unlike the USA, and the report calls for the debate on banking reform to remain as wide as possible. The United Kingdom can only benefit from constructive international agreement, but that prevarication on international agreement must not be used as an excuse to delay, or, at worst, prevent reform. As Britain has a very large banking system relative to GDP compared to other countries, its reform is anyway in the UK's own self-interest, even if it is not coordinated with reforms in other countries.

Failure often presents a valuable learning opportunity, however, students may need motivational scaffolds to protect them from the negative psychological ramifications of failure. This work explored the effectiveness of a motivation-based intervention called an ego-protective buffer (EPB), that was designed to enhance persistence after failure. An ego-protective buffer (EPB) maintains a stable sense of competence by lessening the impact of failure on one's psyche. The specific instantiation of an EPB tested here was designed to elicit a combination of internal and external attributions for failure. External attributions protect one's sense of competence by averting the blame for failure away from the self, while internal attributions encourage students to take some responsibility for remedying the failure situation. Based on this theory, we embedded an EPB into the rule structure of a computer-based genetics game and unleashed it on 143 seventh graders. In the EPB condition, students were told that winning in the game was a probabilistic outcome, dependent on a combination of chance and skill on the part of the students. In the Control condition, students were told that winning in the game was a deterministic outcome, dependent on students' skill only. Students played the game during two class periods. Measures include pre- and posttests, motivational survey measures, and in-game behaviors. The EPB did have an effect on learning, but only amongst high-failing students. High-failing EPB students learned just as much as their low-failing counterparts. This was not so in the Control condition, where high-failing students learned far less than their low-failing counterparts. So the high-failing EPB group was behaving as if they were "buffered" from the effects of failure. We also found evidence of a possible mechanism behind this learning effect. In the high-failing EPB condition, students were equally likely to persist after success and failure, while in the Control condition, students were far more likely to persist after success, exhibiting risk averse behaviors. This difference was more exaggerated in a within-subjects comparison, contrasting the same individuals in situations of high and low failure. Finally, persistence after failure was associated with learning across the full sample of subjects. Regardless of condition or failure rate, students who persisted more after failure also learned more. This study, together with the author's related body of work, provides compelling evidence that an EPB is a viable intervention for encouraging persistence in the face of failure.

Bob Pittman and AOL Time Warner. Jean Marie Messier and Vivendi. Jill Barad and Mattel. Dennis Kozlowski and Tyco. It's an all too common scenario. A great company breaks from the pack; the analysts are in love; the smiling CEO appears on the cover of Fortune. Two years later, the company is in flames, the pension plan is bleeding, the stock is worthless. What goes wrong in these cases? Usually it seems that top management made some incredibly stupid mistakes. But the people responsible are almost always remarkably intelligent and usually have terrific track records. Just as puzzling as the fact that brilliant managers can make bad mistakes is the way they so often magnify the damage. Once a company has made a serious mis-step, it often seems as though it can't do anything right. How does this happen? Instead of rectifying their mistakes, why do business leaders regularly make them worse? To answer these questions, Sydney Finkelstein has carried out the largest research project ever devoted to corporate mistakes and failures. In WHY SMART EXECUTIVES FAIL, he and his research team uncover-with startling clarity and unassailable documentation-the causes regularly responsible for major business breakdowns. He relates the stories of great business disasters and demonstrates that there are specific, identifiable ways in which many businesses regularly make themselves vulnerable to failure. The result is a truly indispensable, practical, must-read book that explains the mechanics of business failure, how to avoid them, and what to do if they happen.

This set of proceedings is based on the International Conference on Advances in Building Technology in Hong Kong on 4-6 December 2002. The two volumes of proceedings contain 9 invited keynote papers, 72 papers delivered by 11 teams , and 133 contributed papers from over 20 countries around the world. The papers cover a wide spectrum of topics across the three technology sub-themes of structures and construction, environment, and information technology. The variety within these categories spans a width of topics, and these proceedings provide readers with a good general overview of recent advances in building research.

Why did some firms weather the financial crisis and others not? This book investigates inner workings of over a dozen major financial and nonfinancial companies, reveals what went wrong and proposes a remedy. Regulators too must learn from past mistakes and require "constructive dialogue" for companies they supervise.