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That Didn't Go As Planned: Success Amnesia and Other Reasons Smart People Make Bad Decisions
Paperback
Series: Culture of Success, Book 2
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 10 2026
Pages: 150
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.32 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
That Didn't Go As Planned is a look at why smart people and successful companies keep making the same bad decisions, often without realizing it until it's too late.
Drawing on well-known corporate failures, forgotten products, and familiar business missteps, this book explores a pattern the author calls Success Amnesia, along with other recurring forces that quietly undermine good decision-making. As confidence grows and momentum builds, warning signs are ignored, assumptions go unchallenged, and reasonable decisions quietly drift into costly mistakes.
This book shows that not all business failures are about incompetence or greed (although there may be a few examples of that as well). Mainly, it's about human behavior-how optimism, comfort, and past success can cloud judgment even in organizations filled with intelligent, experienced people. Along the way, the book introduces simple questions readers can use to recognize these patterns in real time, before hindsight does the work for them.
Part case study, part observation, and part reflection, That Didn't Go As Planned doesn't promise easy fixes or universal frameworks. Instead, it offers something more durable: clarity about how failure actually happens, and how often it starts while everything still looks fine.
If you've ever looked back at a decision and thought, How did this make sense at the time?, then this book is for you.
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