Why companies fail, stop growing or end up being sold for survival despite securing the creation of significant amount of shareholder value and profit for several decades in the past?
The fall of Sears after existence of more than 100 years and the decline of General Electric after Jack Welch's success to create more than 400 billion US dollars of shareholder value have showed that no company can last or sustain its performance in the passage of time and change in the economic environment. As many large and successful companies have failed in last hundred years, it is important to ask the following questions:

1.Why successful companies fail, stop growing, or end up being sold for survival? Are the best management theories and practices developed in the last 100 years not enough to build a company that last?

2.What is objective myopia? Why executives' understanding of the shareholders wealth maximization norm is somehow myopic?

3.What are the five powerful business perspectives that contributed to executives' objective myopia?

4.Is there one best way to manage a business to secure the creation of maximum shareholder value and sustainable profitability which Frederick Taylor started to find 100 years ago?

As I look for answers to the abovementioned questions, I found the importance to look back at the history of the Railroad and Western Union. Both companies possessed the cutting-edge technologies that dominated the American economy in the last quarter of the 19th Century, which is the beginning of the so-called special century (1870-1970) due to the number of inventions that have transformed our economy and way of life in the last hundred years. This is the period too where significant wealth has been created brought by the invention of automobile, the age of oil & gas, the age of electricity, the invention of telephone, the invention of transistor that pave the way for the information age, and many others.

Since one of the subjects is the railroad, I revisited the studies of Theodore Levitt in his award winning article called 'Marketing Myopia' to find out if the executives of the railroad could have saved their company had they viewed their industry correctly as Theodore Levitt explained due to the fact that Sear, one of the model company cited by Theodore Levitt, has failed already.
As I go deeper on the analyses, I found a failure of management, primarily in the allocation of capital, that is going on for more than a century due to the so-called executives' objective myopia, which is the myopic understanding of executives on the true objective of the shareholders in financing their business or company. The five (5) powerful business perspectives but inherently myopic are as follows:

Perspective 1: Do what you love, love what you do, and never give up

Perspective 2: We should broadly define our business around the customers' needs within the industry we are in to sustain its profitability or growth

Perspective 3: Stick to the knitting or invest in what you know

Perspective 4: Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket

Perspective 5: Focus on your core business and core competencies to sustain the company's profitability or growth

In this book, I discuss and illustrate how the wrong use of these business perspectives has prevented many executives to secure the creation of maximum shareholder value and sustainable profitability in the passage of time and change in the economic environment. I will demonstrate also, through examples, how the railroad companies or Western Union could have secured the creation of shareholder value and sustainable profitability in the passage of time and change in the economic environment using the one best way to do work or to manage a business.