Foreword; Acknowledgements; Contents; About the Authors; Praise for Driven to the Brink ; 1: Introduction; Companies Do not Fail, Corporate Boards and Leadership Teams Do; Independent Thinking is the Greatest Value the Board can Add; The Trouble with Dominant CEOs; Board Oversees Strategy and Risk; A Slovenly Approach to Risk Management is a Common Theme; Board Oversees Culture: Culture Defines Leadership; A Productive Ethical Culture must be Part of a Risk-Management Strategy; The Stories that Follow; 2: Enron: Launch to Boom and Bust, 1985-2001.

The Creation of Enron and Its First Ten Years Introducing the Dream Team...?; And then there was the Board; The Enron Culture: 'Rank or Yank'; Global Energy Provider and Trader to Ponzi Scheme, 1994-2001; The Most Creative Financial Officer of the Year: Where there is Smoke there is Fire.; Going Off-Balance Sheet; The Beginning of the End; The Powers Committee Post-Mortem; Ineffectual Board Oversight: Failure in Strategy, Risk Management and Culture; A Few Selected Highlights from the Enron Story; 3: The Banking Crisis: Born of Dreams, Fuelled by Bad Behaviours.

'The Blood of the Global Economy has Begun to Freeze Right from its Heart-The United States' The Pursuit of Happiness: Let the Good Times Roll; Cracks Began to Form: The Unravelling; The Aftermath; Crisis in the UK Started with the 'Run on the Rock'; London's Financial Markets Transformed Through 'Big Bang'; The Good Times in the UK; The Unravelling in the UK; The Aftermath in the UK; Canada: Obama Adviser Looks to Canada's Financial System34; The Good Times in Canada; Canada: Tripped but did not Fall; So What did We Learn from this GLOBAL Crisis: Highlights of Regulatory Reform.

What Role did Inadequate Corporate Governance and Flawed Culture Play? A Productive, Ethical Culture must be Part of a Risk Management Strategy; Moving Forward; A Few Selected Highlights from the Banking Crisis Story; 4: Global Banking: Will the Scandals Never End?; Libor: Rigging Interest Rates on a Grand Scale; Early Days of Libor; Credit Ratings Encouraged Banks to Lowball Submissions; Rigging Rates for Personal Profit; Regulators Moved In; New Scandal Emerges Hard on the Heels of Libor: FX Manipulation; 'The 3 Musketeers' and 'the Cartell' Formed to Manipulate the Fix.

Out in the Open Where were the Systems and Controls to Prevent this?; 'When Bankers Become Detached from End-­Users, Their only Reward Becomes Money' ; Perverse Incentives; Amoral Focus on Profit; When Bad Behaviour is Ignored it will Become Entrenched; A Few Selected Highlights from the Global Banking Story; 5: Olympus: Management was Corrupt at Its Core; Early Days; Appreciation of the Yen Led to Financial Engineering; Hiding Losses in Tokkin; Tobashi: 'Flying Away'; Final Leg of Tobashi Scheme: Three Small Companies; Gyrus Acquisition: Record-Breaking Advisory Fees.

Driven to the Brink is a collection of short stories about corporate disasters and how inadequate governance and flawed culture caused a massive destruction of shareholder value. Look at any major corporate meltdown and two factors emerge: a failure of corporate governance and a culture where short-termism and greed are rewarded and risk is encouraged to flourish unchecked. Two years before the latest crash, Alicia Micklethwait co-wrote the best-selling Greed and Corporate Failure which examined some of the high profile corporate disasters of the early years of the 21st century. Sadly those lessons were forgotten. Companies have continued to be Driven to the Brink of disaster. Now, with co-author Patty Dimond, they examine what we must learn this time around. Drawing on in-depth case studies of the Libor scandal, Olympus, Co-op, Kids Company and others, Dimond and Micklethwait ask what have we learned and more importantly, what can we do to prevent these disasters from happening again? They also examine the large, emerging and less widely understood world of Corporate China with detailed discussion of the Lixel and Glaxo frauds. On a positive note, staying with China, they look at the story of Alibaba and ask is an ethical culture enough to protect shareholder rights?