Crash Report: Red Lobster

It seems to me that about 80% of being a great CEO is not shooting yourself in the foot.

When you combine basic human nature with the pressures of corporate leadership, you get a set of predictable “failure modes” the CEO is likely to fall into. As much as we like to think that leadership is about being a brilliant visionary—and certainly vision and creativity are part of the equation—simply sidestepping common failure modes is a vastly underappreciated factor in CEO success. As Shane Parrish of Farnam Street observed, “It can be difficult to appreciate how much simply avoiding the standard ways of failing dramatically increases the odds of success."

Sometimes those “standard ways of failing” lurk right in our own corporate history. Case in point: Red Lobster, subject of today’s Crash Report.

Twenty years ago, Red Lobster was reeling from a notorious seven-week “endless crab” promotion. The company underestimated how many snow crab legs customers could eat, how much wait times would be i…