The Ups and Downs of Great Companies

A famous company’s history can look inevitable when told backwards. The product succeeds, the decisive moments become clear and early uncertainty is compressed into a few dramatic scenes. Reading more carefully reveals a less tidy story: incomplete information, competing priorities and choices whose consequences were difficult to predict.

Three books offer different perspectives on that process. David Kushner examines the development of Grand Theft Auto, Risto Siilasmaa discusses Nokia’s transformation, and Bob Langert recounts work on sustainability at McDonald’s. They are useful as histories and viewpoints, rather than recipes that promise the same outcome for another organisation.

Creativity and controversy at Rockstar

David Kushner’s Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto follows the people and decisions behind the game franchise. Its subject includes creative ambition, business pressure and the public controversy surrounding the series. The story extends beyond a simple account of a successful product launch.

For a reader interested in business, the useful question is how creative choices interacted with production, distribution and reputation. An idea can attract attention while creating difficult obligations for the organisation that develops it. Attention alone does not explain a durable commercial result.

Avoid reading the book as proof that ignoring every convention leads to success. A provocative decision that appears effective in one history may fail elsewhere. The resources, timing and audience behind a particular result matter, including factors that the participants did not control.

Kushner’s reporting provides material for examining those tensions. A productive reading note might distinguish what the creators intended, what other people understood and what happened afterwards. Those three accounts do not always match.

Nokia and the difficulty of changing course

Transforming Nokia, by Risto Siilasmaa with Catherine Fredman, offers an account from a leader involved in the company’s major changes. It examines a period in which familiar strengths no longer guaranteed an adequate response to a changing market.

The book’s idea of paranoid optimism combines attention to difficult possibilities with a search for workable options. Read that as a way of examining decisions, not a recommendation to remain permanently anxious. A team needs mechanisms for identifying problems and discussing alternatives, rather than confidence alone.

An internal account can explain how a decision looked to the people making it. It also has a particular vantage point. Compare the author’s interpretation with the evidence presented and remember that other employees, partners or observers may describe the same period differently.

The broader lesson is to ask what information reaches decision-makers. Are inconvenient findings discussed early? Can people question an assumption without being treated as disloyal? An organisation’s response to bad news may matter as much as the sophistication of its plans.

McDonald’s and the work behind sustainability

Bob Langert’s The Battle to Do Good: Inside McDonald’s Sustainability Journey describes his experience as a corporate executive working on social and environmental issues. He was not the company’s chief executive. That distinction helps readers understand the position from which the account is written.

The book addresses topics such as packaging, waste, supply chains and animal welfare. These subjects involve practical choices and relationships with people outside the company. A change may require suppliers, specialists, campaigners and internal teams to work through disagreements.

This is different from a guide to turning all criticism into loyalty. Some criticism identifies a problem that needs substantive action. A favourable public response, if it follows, should not be confused with evidence that the underlying issue has been fully resolved.

While reading, ask how a commitment became operational. Who had responsibility? What changed in practice? How was progress assessed? These questions help distinguish a public announcement from the less visible work required to carry it out.

Read success and failure together

The three histories concern different industries, but each invites attention to decisions under uncertainty. They also illustrate why a well-known outcome can distort judgement. Successful firms receive detailed narratives, while less visible companies with similar ambitions may disappear from the comparison.

This is the problem of survivorship bias. Observing a practice among successful organisations does not establish that the practice caused their success. It may also have been common among organisations that struggled, or have mattered only under particular conditions.

Choose one question to carry across the books: how did the organisation respond when its assumptions stopped working? Compare the answers and note their limits. Business history becomes more useful when it improves the questions you ask about your own situation, rather than encouraging you to copy the most memorable gesture of a famous company.

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