Breaking Failure: How to Break the Cycle of Business Failure and Underperformance Using Root Cause, Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, and an Early Warning System

Despite advances in technology, theory, data analytics, and strategic planning techniques, business failure and underperformance continue unabated. By recent estimate, products have a failure rate of 42%, and 84% of marketing programs fail to generate positive ROI. Why? Is it incompetence? Overconfidence? Bad timing? Global competition? Sometimes... but rarely. These factors simply don't explain why smart, well-educated and seasoned professionals and companies fail at such high rates. Breaking Failure offers simple, risk-free, low-cost ways to break cycles of failure and underperformance by adapting three well-proven techniques from disciplines outside business. Building on techniques proven in manufacturing and space exploration, you'll learn how to use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to uncover the root cause of problems, so you can solve them and once and for all. Next, utilizing well-proven Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) techniques, you'll learn how to anticipate potential failure points before you introduce your product, implement your strategy, or launch your next marketing campaign. Third, you'll learn how to use an Early Warning System (EWS) to identify "driver" variables in your business, gaining timely and actionable insights without the intense complexity of conventional predictive modeling. These techniques aren't new or trendy: they've proven themselves over decades in some of the world's highest-stakes, most mission-critical environments. If you want to prevent business failure and underperformance, they will work for you, too.