Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail
Governance and Management Lessons from the Crisis
Thomas H. Stanton
Reviews and Awards
"Tom Stanton has given us a cogent and powerful analysis of the key forces that catapulted America to financial disaster. Through this book and his impressive work for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, he has provided us a roadmap to help avert future catastrophe. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the financial and economic crisis that continues to grip our nation."--Phil Angelides, Chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, former State Treasurer of California
"Tom Stanton's book should be high-priority reading for senior managers and policymakers. Careful consideration of the well-reasoned arguments in this book will necessarily be part of any serious effort to reform our financial regulatory system, strengthen firm governance and risk management, and promote greater overall financial stability--all critical prerequisites to assuring a strong and resilient economy, and rising standards of living, over time."--Rich Spillenkothen, former director of Banking Supervision and Regulation, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
"Governance failures were central to the financial crisis, and they continue to be a primary focus of post-crisis financial regulation. Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail is a serious appraisal of the lessons behind those failures, and a guidebook for managers who hope to make effective risk management a cornerstone of their companies."--Eugene A. Ludwig, former Comptroller of the Currency, Founder and CEO of Promontory Financial Group
"Tom Stanton makes a powerful case for constructive dialogue inside companies and between companies and regulators to reduce unnecessary business risk. Such dialogue between those responsible for performance and those responsible for integrity materially improves the chances the problems are defined properly, key factors are properly weighted and ultimate decisions are sound."--Ben W. Heineman, Jr., Senior Fellow at Harvard School of Law and School of Government, former Senior Vice President-General Counsel, General Electric
"Tom Stanton told us in 1991 that the fatal design of government-sponsored enterprises would escalate risk in housing finance. He was proved right-too late. Now he explains the management and organizational characteristics which provide for survival, while the less prepared are collapsing, in the inevitable hard times of financial cycles. We need to concentrate on remembering these lessons when the next boom gets rolling."--Alex J. Pollock, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, former President and CEO, Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago
"Drawing from many interviews conducted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Stanton's book considers how various important firms dealt successfully with such uncertainty (or failed to do so with disastrous results) and the severe organizational stresses and dynamics involved as financial events that were considered impossible by many or most people nevertheless became reality. The personal accounts of discussions, arguments, and decisions about riskiness, often enough career-ending ones, instructively display the uncertainty always involved. What is truly needed, and what Stanton's book so interestingly explores, is how organizations can facilitate the Minskian dialectic of enterprise and prudence, and how they can improve their chances of making sound judgments in the face of ineluctable uncertainty."--The American