History repeats itself. But so soon?

Imagine: The subprime mortgage disaster might have been averted, or at least lessened, had bankers done some homework.

According to a new article in the Harvard Business Review, the lessons of risky betting on newfangled securities that ride on the swell of a housing bubble were there to be learned had the people running Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch looked back to the savings and loan debacle of the early 1990s.

In pictures:
Seven ways to fail big
16 solid small-biz web site design tips

Those leaders “had no fundamental experience in the risk,” says Chunka Mui, who, with co-author Paul C. Carroll, distills the essence of business disasters at 750 companies in the last 25 years in “7 Ways to Fail Big.”

The common thread is misjudgment of risk. The mistakes that qualify for a study like this are always costly, whether they result in massive layoffs, cutbacks or bankruptcy.

While the classic failures listed in this report are in no particular sequence, one jumps to the top. It is as if it were a blueprint of the root cause of the current credit crisis.