A Brief Book Review of The Ten Commandments of Business Failure by Donald R. Keogh
“I've been in this game for years, it made me an animal / There's rules to this sh*t, I wrote me a manual / A step-by-step booklet for you to get your game on track, not your wig pushed back” — The Notorious B.I.G. (1997)
At its heart, The Ten Commandments for Business Failure (2008) is about the costs and rewards in business of courage, thoughtfulness, and optimism. Three traits that author Donald R. Keough (1926-2015) seems to have had in spades. Keough had a business career one could by any measure consider blessed. After forty-plus years with the Coca Cola Company, culminating in roles as President and Chief Operating Officer, Keough began a second career as an active board member in leading companies. Among others, he served on the boards of IAC, McDonald’s, Allen & Company, The Washington Post Company, H.J. Heinz Company, Home Depot, and Berkshire Hathaway.
It was at the 2019 Annual Shareholder Meeting of the lattermost earlier this month that I picked up Keough’s book. It sat beside a dozen other titles chosen by Warren Buffett for recognition and sale to the thousands of shareholders who make the annual pilgrimage to Omaha. I had long been interested in learning more about Keough’s approach to business because of his unique relationship with Buffett.
In 1960, when Buffett was 30 years old and Keough was 34 years old, the two met. Keough had just bought a house across the street from Buffett in Omaha. Back then, both were by no means the famous executives and business leaders they would become. According to Buffett, “We were just two guys trying to make a living to feed our families.” The Oracle of Omaha, as Buffett would only later be called, was then a relatively unknown manager of a young investment partnership called Buffett Partners, Ltd. As they both retell it, Buffett knocked on the door of his new neighbor Keough and asked him to invest $10,000 or so in the partnership. Keough flat out rejected him. Despite Keough giving Buffett the Mutumbo finger wag, the two went on to form a close friendship and business relationship that lasted decades. “Don can tell you to go to hell so wonderfully you’ll enjoy the journey,” Buffett writes in the forward. Keough eventually realized the error of his ways, though, becoming a shareholder and board member of Buffett’s next investment platform, Berkshire Hathaway, the fifth largest company in the world by market capitalization, which at the time of my writing was $500 billion.
Buffett described Keough as “one of the few guys I feel I can hand the keys over to.” And Keough heaps praise on his neighbor, friend, and business associate, calling Buffett “the world’s greatest simplifier.” While these two were fond of each other and kindred spirits, Keough was his own man. A philosophy major in college who dabbled in theater and clearly had a knack for storytelling, throughout the book, Keough sprinkled beautiful quotes I’d never before encountered from the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and William Blake. These are all in service of his central thesis, told with vigor and dozens of case studies, namely: “You will fail if you quit taking risks, are inflexible, isolated, assume infallibility, play the game close to the line, don’t take time to think, put all your faith in outside experts, love your bureaucracy, send mixed messages, and fear failure.”
I really enjoyed this witty, punchy book. Keough won me over with his charming writing style, tactful use of inversions to make his points, and the thoroughness with which he manages to explore these ideas despite the book’s brevity. I will happily revisit this.