Business

Brief summary Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years Welcome to Business Failure 101 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. * 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? ISBN:9781591842194 Author: Paul B. Carroll & Chunka Mui

Brief Summary In Everybody Matters, CEO Bob Chapman and bestselling author Raj Sisodia challenge traditional thinking about how to run a business and how to be an inspirational leader. Starting in 1997, Barry-Wehmiller CEO Bob Chapman has pioneered a dramatically different approach to leadership that creates off-the-charts morale, loyalty, creativity, and business performance. At Barry-Wehmiller, every single person matters, just like in a family. That's not a cliché on a mission statement; it's the bedrock of the company's success. In Everybody Matters, Chapman and co-author Raj Sisodia show how any organization can stop viewing its employees are simply func­tions, to be moved around, 'managed' with carrots and sticks, or discarded at will. By doing so, disengaged workers begin to share their gifts and talents toward a shared future. Uninspired workers stop feeling that their jobs have no meaning. And everyone stops counting the minutes until it's time to go home. Everybody Matters chronicles Chapman's journey to find his true calling and provides clear steps to transform your own workplace, whether you lead two people or two hundred thousand. ISBN:2147483647 Author:Bob Chapman & Raj Sisodia

The ten secrets of entrepreneurs is a compelling guide to the ten key differences between successful or extraordinary entrepreneurs and unsuccessful or ordinary employees and the way they think and behave. This life-changing book will show how anyone can learn to switch their thinking to that of an extraordinary entrepreneurs and enjoy a more rewarding and fulfilling professional and personal life. The distinctions include: entrepreneurs have an empowering perspective of failure. Employees see failure as bad. Entrepreneurs are solution finders. Employees are problem solvers. Entrepreneurs look into the future. Employees look into the past. In uncertain times, everyone wants to have more meaning and purpose in their professional and personal lives. In this inspirational and prescriptive guide, keith cameron smith leads readers from a passive and possibly fearful view of their future to one they can actively engage in and firmly believe in. ISBN:2147483647 Author:Keith Cameron Smith

Economic news has been making major worldwide headlines in recent months, but those among us who live outside the esoteric world of high finance are too often mystified by bankers' and economists' jargon. Author Katie Huston has come to our rescue with Tweetonomics, an entertaining and informative book that explains each of the most important economic terms and ideas in 20 "tweets" or less. Limiting her explanations to 140-character "tweets," she resorts to clear, simple English that flies straight to the point. In nine chapters she explains how the economy works, the role of governments, the big economic ideas, and the thinkers like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes who created them. Here are short and sweet definitions of terms that include-- Free Market * Supply and Demand * GDP Balance of Trade * Monetarism * Keynesianism Marxism * Derivatives Market * Stock Options Hedge Funds * Dow Jones * NASDAQ Credit Default Swaps * Fannie Mae * Freddie Mac . . . and many more. In these extraordinary economic times Tweetonomics is a book that belongs on everybody's must-read list. Brief, pithy, and to-the-point definitions are complemented with clever cartoon illustrations. ISBN:2147483647 Author:Nic Compton, Adam Fishwick & Katie Huston