It was once popular, some years after a best-selling management book highlighted specific companies as exemplars of this or that fad, to reassess those businesses and to delight perversely in how far the putatively mighty had fallen. . . it can be instructive to run down the rolls of champions touted as winners for their expression of this or that management philosophy, and to see to what dire straits – or even oblivion – so many of them have tumbled. What does that say about the management models those companies were used as the poster children for?
