If I have learnt one thing in business journalism, it is that flops and failures are rarely available for interview, while successes flock to the limelight.
By the same token, business leaders love biographies, where in the lives of great figures they can trace the similarities to their own careers. Consultants and academics research leading companies while corporate laggards shrink from study.
So the curse of “best practice” spreads. Chief executives seek simple, repeatable patterns in success stories. Here is the problem, though: often those patterns are neither simple nor repeatable. Worse still, they may propagate bad behaviour and unproductive methods.