Billion Dollar Lessons
What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
”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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Carroll (Big Blues) and Mui (Unleashing the Killer App) collaborate to perform an autopsy on some of the most spectacular business failures and corporate disasters in recent times, hunting down the fatal strategies responsible. The authors examine more than 750 "inexcusable" corporate collapses, neatly cataloguing them into eight common "failure patterns": doomed practices, including the "Illusion of Synergies," as illustrated by the ruinous merger attempts by Sears and Dean Witter; "Faulty Financial Engineering," as conducted by Tyco and Revco; "Staying the (Misguided) Course Too Long," a sin committed by Kodak, which missed the boat on digital photography; and "Consolidation Blues," as depicted by U.S. Airways, which crashed as a consequence of buying up too many companies too quickly. While there are assuredly lessons in defeat and the authors' detailed analysis and bracing honesty is welcome, readers hoping for a more encouraging or inspirational business book might find Carroll and Mui's avalanche of disastrous failures, avoidable bankruptcies and destruction of shareholder value a depressing if highly instructive read.
