A century-old U.S. trucking company, Yellow Corp, is filing for bankruptcy and more than 20,000 people will lose their jobs.

Any business leader should be curious why a company, regardless of how long it’s been in business, arrived at this point. What mistakes were made, or opportunities missed? What lessons can leaders extract from this?

In episode #2 of my Leadership and Learning Podcast, Tom Corrick, retired CEO of Boise Cascade, shared a few nuggets along this line. He talked about searching the Wall Street Journal daily for articles on “where everything went wrong” and how he got to “live a disaster in leadership without having to actually live it.” You can listen to this nugget of wisdom here.

This reminds me of what I learned from one of my first bosses that is basic to success.

Leadership Tip
You have to sell a product or service for more money than it cost you to make or provide.

Common sense, really.

When you’re leading a company or a business unit such as a sales department or a manufacturing plant, you’re making many decisions along the way—decisions about product quality, service levels, customer commitments, market trends, competition, pricing, market share, and costs to name the biggies.

A typical scenario might look like this:

• The company leader would like to see profitable growth.
• The manufacturing leader would like to see investments made in manufacturing in order to increase productivity and lower costs. That leader would also like to see the sales and marketing costs go down and the price to the customer be as high as possible.
• The sales leader would like the manufacturing costs to go down and quality to go up while still being competitive in the marketplace with the price to the customer as low as possible.

To achieve sustainable profitable growth, all members of the leadership team have to make decisions together. They must plan, strategize, prioritize, coordinate, communicate, cooperate, and collaborate. If they don’t, they could suffer dire consequences.

What happened in Yellow Corp’s situation? I don’t know, but it’s worth exploring to make sure you don’t “live a disaster in leadership without having to actually live it.”