Review of Derailed

Derailed: Five Lessons Learned from Catastrophic Failures of Leadership, by Tim Irwin, PhD discusses the principles of leadership and where some of the high level CEOs have failed and why.  Six CEOs are profiled, and the author identifies the lessons learned, thendescribes how to avoid the failures.

Derailed fell flat for me because it didn’t give anything that I didn’t know already, and there were areas I thought it should have addressed.  One of the things that never gets mentioned–and it is obvious to me–is that in each case when the CEO failed, he came in to fix a company that needed change.   When I was in the army, we had a bad leader who caused morale to sink to a new low.  We needed change, and when the old leader left, the new one rushed in to fix the problem.  She alienated everyone.  Yet, she’d been in this position twice before, quite successfully, but the difference was the change.  Would these leaders have been successful if they had come into a  company that was doing well and didn’t need change?   They certainly would have made different decisions.

The book felt a little like it was treating the symptoms and not getting at the underlying causes.

Disclaimer:  I received this book for free from Thomas-Nelson, the publisher, in exchange for doing this review.