High on sales, low on creativity

Seeing a business struggle and then fail is an agonizing experience. But unfortunately, as someone who has reported about the economic reform in the last three decades, I have seen too many companies fail, and too many brands disappear.

Not the so-called SOEs, or State-owned enterprises which have never learned to be enterprising. They have always been faced by problems in which their survival is at stake. But with depending on the government's bailout being their strategy, I have no doubt that they will be slow to learn, if not quick to die.

But sometimes, seemingly successful market-economy companies, like Kodak and Xerox, have also managed to get themselves to the point of almost falling into oblivion. And it is painful to see how some of them could have become like this after they had built considerable China operations and consumer reputation.