How to make sense of corporate cock-ups

“SORRY” IS NOTAOLATTU a word you hear often in business. Japanese miscreants may bow in shame. But in the West even architects of some of the world’s most spectacular strategic blunders struggle to express remorse. It took Gerald Levin, boss of Time Warner, a decade to apologise for what he finally admitted was “the worst deal of the century”—the $165bn merger of the media giant with , an internet firm, in 2001, during the dotcom crash. It was unravelled, ignominiously, eight years later.Who knows when—or indeed if—Randall Stephenson and his former lieutenant, , will acknowledge how wrong they were to mastermind the $110bn acquisition of Time Warner by & , which they completed in 2018. The combination created a company weighed down by huge debts, a high dividend and onerous investment demands. A mere three years later it, too, is being dismantled, with the media business spun out and , another media firm. Mr Stankey, who took over from Mr Stephenson as the telecoms giant’s boss last year, has bowed not in shame, but to the inevitable. It was -turn or bust.