Why They Do It

Eugene Soltes, a professor at Harvard Business School, spent seven years getting to know the executives behind some of the largest corporate crimes, from Bernie Madoff's and Allen Stanford's Ponzi schemes to fraud at Enron and embezzlement at Tyco. Drawing on visits, letters and phone calls with almost fifty of these former executives, several of whom had never before discussed their crimes, and on research in psychology, criminology and economics, he asks why successful people risk everything. His answer sets aside simple greed, hubris and careful cost-benefit reasoning: most of them decided on intuition and gut feeling, instincts often badly suited to a business world where leaders sit far from the people their choices affect. It came out in 2016.

Quineñco chief executive Francisco Perez Mackenna put it on his summer reading in a roundup of books CEOs planned to read.