Sometimes even the biggest companies start to behave in self-defeating and even insane ways: As when

Shell outraged Europe by seeking to dump the Brent Spar oil platform in the North Atlantic, and lost millions when its customers boycotted its pumps.

IBM made the biggest loss in corporate history -- close to $5 Billion in a single year -- by fumbling the market for PCs it had itself created.

Coca-Cola tried to change the taste of the best known brand on Earth, with disastrous results.

Hoover came up with a promotional plan so clever it couldn't fail -- and lost $50 million.

McDonalds sued two unknown vegetarian protesters for libel and became bogged down in the longest libel suit in British legal history: a two-year PR nightmare.

Perrier tried to cover up the long-concealed truth about the purity of its product, and lost its market leadership when the truth finally came out.

Usually these corporate disasters are written off simply as errors of judgement; poor management, 'pilot error'.

BAD COMPANY goes behind the corporate mask to show that such failures are far from being simple errors, but are often the real face of the company: unheeding, self-deluding -- sometimes self-destructive virtually to the point of corporate insanity.

BAD COMPANY goes even further and puts some of the world's best known commercial corporations on the analyst's couch to find out the real causes of their aberrant, sometimes crazy behaviour and comes up with some astonishing new answers from the field of motivational research: findings even more astounding than those of "The Hidden Persuaders", four decades ago.

BAD COMPANY does not merely investigate: it sets out a step-by-step method that anyone can follow to evaluate just how trustworthy any given corporation is: the brand-new science of Corporate Psychological Profiling.

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