So you're Head of Dessert Development, Sunshine Foods, and you've staked your considerable reputation on a trifle. The venture fails. You lose hundreds and thousands. Now all of a sudden you're at sixes and sevens. What do you do? Top yourself? Leave your clothes in a heap on a windswept beach, walk away from everything and create a new identity for yourself? No. You read this book, put it all in perspective and reassure yourself that there's always someone who has done worse. After all, it's not as if you've lost £869 million … as Nick Leeson did. He and Barings feature prominently in this litany of business disasters--along with numerous major corporations, (in)famous entrepreneurs, misconceived innovations and well-conceived frauds. The author, Geoff Tibballs, spreads his net to cover a wide range of mishaps. Some of the more obscure include the follies of Fonthill Abbey and the Bramber Council and the mischievous typos in the 1631 bible ("Thou shalt commit adultery…"). The list of better known blunders reads like the syllabus at the Denis Norden School of Business: DeLorean, Ratners, the C5,the Advanced Passenger Train, New Coke, Hoover's flight offer, the Hitler Diaries… With this sort of material to get his teeth into Tibballs has real fun. He writes in an engaging, journalistic style and, when prising out the juicy bits, can't resist sticking his tongue into his cheek: "…just as the White Star Line had the Titanic and the Bond films had George Lazenby, so Ford had the Edsel"; or, of the 19th century American financier, George Ralston, "Ralston was beside himself, which given his ample girth, was an illusion he often created." Sir John Harvey-Jones, in his Introduction, writes, "This book, as well as being fun reading, does actually have a subliminal message for us all." He's right to a degree. These cautionary tales are certainly interesting, but the lessons to be learnt from them are real and overt: "innovate constantly, but research thoroughly", "seize opportunities", "manage and regulate effectively" and "don't get conned." But then Harvey-Jones has been there and done it without warranting a chapter of his own--and when, as he points out, "the borderline between business blunder and business brilliance is the merest hair's breadth", that's no trifling achievement. --Martin Drewe