“It was the biggest corporate gaffe of all time”: Five lessons from the rise, fall, and rise of Gerald Ratner

Gerald Ratner doesn’t spend much time on Twitter these days. But it’s not the echo chamber, or the noxious debate, or the latent threat of cancellation at every turn that keeps him away. It’s his name. Once the shimmering moniker above the world’s greatest jewellery empire, those six letters now mean something else entirely, as Twitter will eagerly remind you. In business textbooks across the world, ‘Doing a Ratner’ has become shorthand for a corporate or public blunder of catastrophic proportions — a foot-in-mouth moment of forehead-slapping calamity. Needless to say, these days it trends all too frequently in hashtag form.