The Long Fall
An abandoned executive boardroom at night, cut by hard shadows

An interactive corporate autopsy · Casebook 01

The Long Fall

Hard to get to the top. Frightfully easy to wipe out.

Ten corporations · Ten scenes of collapse
Filing years: 1991—2018

Scroll to open the ledger

Premise

The view from the penthouse conceals the fire below.

Dominance can look like permanence. It is not. A protected market turns competitive. A cash machine becomes an albatross. Debt removes room to manoeuvre. Numbers are massaged until the arithmetic finally calls the police.

Bankruptcy is not one story. Some companies vanished; some reorganised; some names survived after the original enterprise did not. The common thread is more unnerving: scale amplified the error.

10case files
40–158years from founding to filing
5recurring failure pressures

Evidence room

The case files

Select a corporation to inspect the rise, fracture, filing and afterlife.

10 files recoveredClick arrow for full autopsy

    Pattern analysis

    Anatomy of a wipe-out

    The dramatic filing arrives last. Long before the courthouse, the same pressures recur in different combinations. Select a pressure to return to those files.

    “At the top, every warning sounds like background noise.”

    The fatal error is rarely a single decision. It is a system that makes correction impossible.

    Chain of custody

    Research sources

    Open research sources
    1. Smithsonian — Pan American Airways
    2. Yale Insights — Polaroid
    3. NPR — Lehman Brothers
    4. Harvard Baker Library — Lehman
    5. U.S. Treasury — General Motors
    6. Harvard Business School — GM
    7. The Canadian Encyclopedia — Nortel
    8. CBC News — Nortel
    9. NPR — Borders
    10. Forbes — Kodak
    11. Blockbuster Bend — History
    12. Wharton — Toys R Us
    13. BBC News — Toys R Us
    14. Reuters — Sears