Bethany McLean on stories of business gone wrong

Stories of business gone wrong are very rarely about bad people setting out to do bad things.  They're almost always this mixture of self-delusion, sheer stupidity, banality, greed - but often greed in the service of ego rather than for the sheer sake of money, maybe a little outright corruption.  But they're these almost Shakespearean stories of very very human weaknesses.  They add up to corruption in the end in many cases, but they don't set out with a deliberate decision to do bad things.

As a journalist you only wish you could find that moment where the leaders of the global financial system sat in a dark, preferably smokey room off Wall Street in 2006 and plotted the demise of the financial system, right?  That would be a great cinematic moment for a journalist, but those moments just don't really exist in these stories.  And so one thing I've learned is that just because really smart people believe in something, it doesn't mean they're right.  And just because they're a true believer, doesn't mean you should be, too.

~ Bethany McLean, "Two Decades of Covering Business: A Journalist’s View, "Mendoza College of Business (University of Notre Dame), April 9, 2019