He asked Sorger for a handkerchief and said, "Listen to me for a while," speaking of "business failure," "inability to compete," "wife and children," and the "impossibility of returning to Europe".
The survey highlights, yet again, small business owners' inability to seize a new market opportunity over their larger competitors.
But Mr. Ovitz, who is said by Hollywood executives to have lost anywhere from $70 million to $100 million of his own money on the venture, saw it unravel because of high overhead, the absence of a coherent business plan, the inability to lure significant financial partners as well as his own failure to bring in high-paid movie stars.
The result is narrow insights into the business and an inability to get a 360-degree view of the customer or business problem.
In its latest survey of the EU and the eurozone, the OECD said obstacles to labour mobility remained one of the three significant barriers to growth, alongside a failure to break the banking sector's monopoly on lending to businesses and Brussels' inability to tackle restrictions that remain in the single market.
And it has become clear that the widespread euphoria over Mr. Fox's election has given way to a crabby debate about his pro-business policies, his inability to negotiate political alliances with the Congress and the dissonant messages his government sometimes projects.
They pay not only in legal fees, but in foreclosed homes when seniors can't afford their mortgages, in depressed spending at local businesses, in an inability to attract new and talented workers, and in growing economic inequality as the city's middle class falls further behind.
"It reflects the broad-based loss of confidence in the business community and their inability to make significant capital investment, be it M.&A.
It had little presence in America, less talent for trading, almost no bond business and a singular inability to make money for anybody but its employees.
"It just amazes me, the inability of business to get itself together and organize around this," said Edward F. Lawlor, the dean of the school of social work at Washington University.
When President George W. Bush pushed to revamp immigration laws in 2007, the inability of business and labor to agree on a plan for temporary guest workers was among the main reasons that effort failed.
