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Billion Dollar Lessons - What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years (Paperback)
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Billion Dollar Lessons - What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years (Paperback)
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List price R361
Loot Price R286
Discovery Miles 2 860
You Save R75 (21%)
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In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his
office after his venture lost $10 million. Watson asked the man if
he knew why he'd been called in. The man said he 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". In "Billion-Dollar Lessons", Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui
draw on research into more than 750 business failures to reveal the
misguided tactics that mire companies again and again. There are
thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none
about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn.
Lesson One: The Cold Hard Facts Between 1981 and 2006, 423 major
publicly held U.S. companies with combined assets totaling $1.5
trillion filed for bankruptcy. Hundreds more took huge write-offs,
discontinued major operations, or were acquired under duress. Again
and again, companies follow the same wrong-headed strategies that
brought down businesses in the past. The sub-prime mortgage crisis
that cost companies tens of billions of dollars in 2007 and 2008
echoes the ill-conceived strategies that pushed Green Tree
Financial and Conseco into bankruptcy years earlier. Tom Watson's
executive's $10 million lesson seems cheap by comparison. Lesson
Two: Failure Patterns Carroll and Mui found that the number one
cause of failure was misguided strategy-not sloppy execution, poor
leadership, or bad luck. These strategic errors fall into seven
categories, including: pursuing nonexistent synergies: Quaker Oats'
purchase of Snapple was supposed to capitalize on distribution
synergies but instead led to a $1.7 billion write-off; moving into
an "adjacent" market that isn't really adjacent: Avon decided its
"culture of caring" qualified it to operate retirement homes.
Subsequent write-offs totaled $545 million; and, buying more
problems than efficiencies through misguided consolidation: Despite
pioneering the discount department store years before Sam Walton
came along, Ames Department Stores flubbed consolidation efforts,
landing in bankruptcy twice before eventually liquidating. Lesson
Three: Avoid Making the Same Mistakes But there's light at the end
of the tunnel: "Billion-Dollar Lessons" provides proven methods
that managers, boards, and even investors can adopt to avoid making
the same mistakes. While there's no way to guarantee success, this
book draws on vivid, off-the-beaten-track examples to help you
avoid failure by showing you how to thoroughly assess potentially
disastrous strategies before they bring your company down. Required
Reading: Think of "Billion-Dollar Lessons" as the flip side of Good
to Great, but just as eye-opening and essential as that business
classic. There's enormous value in learning from companies that
lost millions (if not billions) in pursuit of strategies that led
to spectacular flameouts. Everyone makes mistakes, but why make the
same mistakes over and over?
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