Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Ye ars

Front Cover
Penguin, Sep 11, 2008 - Business & Economics - 336 pages
”This book is your chance to learn from others’ mistakes.”-- Entrepreneur

In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”

There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn. Now Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 flameouts to reveal the seven biggest reasons for business failure.
 

Contents

Can Fatal Strategic Flaws Only Be Recognized in Hindsight?
1
Illusions of Synergy Succumbing to the Eighth Deadly Synergy
15
Faulty Financial Engineering Taking a Shortcut Through the Numbers
37
Deflated Rollups Buying a String of Rock Bands to Form an Orchestra
60
Staying the Misguided Course Threat? What Threat?
86
Misjudged Adjacencies The Grass Isnt Always Greener
116
Fumbling Technology Riding the Wrong Technology
141
Consolidation Blues Doubling Down on a Bad Hand
169
Coda
190
Why Bad Strategies Happen to Good People Awareness Is Not Enough
197
Why Bad Strategies Happen to Good Companies Awareness Is Still Not Enough
216
The Devils Advocate Unleashing the Power of Conflict and Deliberation
231
The Safety Net An Independent Devils Advocate Review
258
Two Revolutions
273
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2008)

Paul B. Carroll wrote for The Wall Street Journal for seventeen years. The author of Big Blues,/I, he founded Context, the first "new economy" magazine, in 1997. Now a freelance writer, he lives outside Sacramento, California.

Chunka Mui is the coauthor of the major business bestseller Unleashing the Killer App and a fellow at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants. He lectures and consults widely on strategy and innovation, and lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Bibliographic information