The numbers are the last to know.
By the time a company’s accounts show distress, the story is usually two years old. The real early warnings were somewhere else: in the owner’s calendar, in the questions that stopped being asked, in the loyal deputy who left quietly, in the new loan that everyone privately knew would change nothing.
I’ve watched this happen for twenty years. I’m a restructuring lawyer at the Lyon Bar in France. Business owners sit in my office — usually eighteen months later than they should have — and courts appoint me to pick up what’s left when they don’t come at all. Alongside my practice, I’m a doctoral researcher at Durham University Business School, studying 151 judicial cases of company failure to understand a simple, uncomfortable question: why don’t owners see it coming — and why doesn’t anyone tell them?
There is excellent research on this. On escalation of commitment. On founder identity. On why organizations go silent around a struggling leader. Almost none of it ever reaches the people who could use it.
This newsletter is for you if you run a company — any company. Not because you’re failing. Because the research says you won’t see it if you ever are, and neither will anyone around you. One essay a month: a true pattern from the field, the research that explains it, and a way to check your own blind spots.
Subscribe — it’s free, and it might be the earliest warning you ever get.
