How to Kill a Company with a Book by Prem Pradeep

There are a thousand books about how to build a company. This one points the other way. The company was doing fine. That was the problem. How to Kill a Company with a Book is a darkly funny satire told by the most devoted man in the building, the one who loved the company so much he grew it, reorganized it, transformed it, and quietly killed it, one reasonable-sounding decision at a time. He never meant any harm. He gave it thirty years, every evening, every weekend, a whole life. That, it turns out, was the murder weapon. Follow one ordinary company through ten faithful steps of its own destruction: the decision to expand, the impressive new boss who "managed larger," the borrowed operating model, the framework that worked somewhere else, the people quietly relabeled legacy, the layoffs blamed on the market, the bold new AI pivot, and the empty office where it all began. Written in the spirit of The Screwtape Letters and the old wartime sabotage manuals, it teaches entirely by inversion. It offers no advice. It simply shows you what was done, and lets you feel the temperature drop one degree at a time. If you have ever sat in a meeting where someone said the word plateau, you have already met this company.