After reading about many failing companies IBM, HP, GE etc, I am becoming unsure if Financial engineering led to failures later on or they were already failing

After reading about many failing companies IBM, HP, GE etc, I am becoming unsure if Financial engineering led to failures later on or they were already failing and just resorted to financial engineering to cover up. Regarding Mark Hurd, there was that funny story that his replacement Leo Apotheker burned 11 billion dollars on Autonomy purchase and HP had to write off ~9 billions in a year or two. Mark was at Oracle and refused to buy Autonomy at 6 billion dollars few months earlier.