When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns

To understand success, you must first understand failure. This understanding is especially critical since failure is a phenomenon that is much more common to everyday life, businesses, and government practice than standard theory would lead us to assume. Failure manifests itself in many ways, including breakdowns, bankruptcies, and other forms of organizational catastrophes and fiascoes. Thus, learning from failure will enable success. When Things Go Wrong brings together contributions from 24 leading scholars who examine the causes, patterns, process, and outcomes of such failures from economic, managerial, cognitive and political perspectives. This book presents failure as a relative concept in terms of the expectations and strategies of stakeholders putting a claim on the performance of the organization and the notion of success. It challenges future research in this field to combine both economic and non-economic performance measures to assess organizational tendencies toward success and failure and to differentiate between failure as process and failure as an outcome.

Helmut K. Anheier, PhD, is President and Dean at the Hertie School of Governance, and holds a chair of sociology at Heidelberg University. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1986, was a senior researcher at John Hopkins School of Public Policy, Professor of Public Policy and Social Welfare at UCLA′s Luskin School of Public Affairs, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Professor Anheier founded and directed the Centre for Civil Society at LSE, the Center for Civil Society at UCLA, and the Center for Social Investment at Heidelberg. Before embarking on an academic career, he served as social affairs officer to the United Nations. 

He is author of over 400 publications, and won various international prizes and recognitions for his scholarship. Amongst his recent book publications are Nonprofit Organizations - Theory, Management, Policy (London: Routledge, 2014), A Versatile American Institution: The Changing Ideals and Realities of Philanthropic Foundations with David Hammack (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2013) and The Global Studies Encyclopedia with Mark Juergensmeyer (5 vols, Sage, 2012).  He is the principal academic lead of the Hertie School´s annual Governance Report (Oxford University Press, 2013-), and currently working on projects relating to indicator research, social innovation, and success and failure in philanthropy.