Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Avoiding the Chain of Mistakes that Can Destroy Your Organization.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Brief article - Book review

Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Avoiding the Chain of Mistakes that Can Destroy Your Organization. By Robert E. Mittelstaedt Jr. Wharton School Publishing, 309 pages. $25.95.

"Stay off the front page of The Wall Street Journal," shouts the jacket of this book. The implication is unmistakable: Make a serious business error, and the consequences may very well include embarrassing publicity.

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A central theme in this terrific, entertaining and insightful book is that companies will make mistakes, but need to have systems in place to catch them early and manage them. Author Mittelstaedt, dean of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, introduces the concept of "[M.sup.3]," or "managing multiple mistakes," a process than can pare losses to a minimum.

A chain of influences is like a flywheel, which requires considerable exertion to stop it, he writes. "Once the mistake flywheel starts rolling, each mistake adds momentum, making it harder to stop the sequence." Martha Stewart, he writes, "chose to never 'step...