Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Avoiding the Chain of Mistakes that Can Destroy Your Organization.

Will Your Next Mistake Be Fatal? Avoiding the Chain of Mistakes that Can Destroy Your Organization. By Robert E. Mittelstaedt Jr. Wharton School Publishing, 309 pages. $25.95.

"Stay off the front page of The Wall Street Journal," shouts the jacket of this book. The implication is unmistakable: Make a serious business error, and the consequences may very well include embarrassing publicity.

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A central theme in this terrific, entertaining and insightful book is that companies will make mistakes, but need to have systems in place to catch them early and manage them. Author Mittelstaedt, dean of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, introduces the concept of "[M.sup.3]," or "managing multiple mistakes," a process than can pare losses to a minimum.

A chain of influences is like a flywheel, which requires considerable exertion to stop it, he writes. "Once the mistake flywheel starts rolling, each mistake adds momentum, making it harder to stop the sequence." Martha Stewart, he writes, "chose to never 'step on the brake' to slow the wheel and break the chain by admitting anything along the way," and ended up convicted in an insider trading case that many felt could have turned out far differently.

Mittelstaedt uses a wealth of examples, from the Titanic disaster to Enron to the explosion of the Columbia shuttle and the New Coke flop, among others. He dissects each, drilling down to reveal the core failures--corporate culture, unpreparedness, overconfidence, etc. Yet he also discusses success stories, such as Johnson & Johnson's deft handling of the Tylenol scare in 1982.

Written with tremendous perspicacity, this book is one of the most compelling of this or any year. For executives charged with formulating crisis management, its lessons are literally indispensable.