Microsoft’s announcement that it will offer 0% financing on many software purchases of as much as $1 million is the sort of creative approach that healthy companies can take to win market share during the economic crisis.

Flush with cash, Microsoft can afford to offer financing at a time when other sources of credit have just about dried up for many businesses. In fact, the financing will cost Microsoft little. Once Microsoft has paid the huge costs for developing software, producing additional copies costs almost nothing, so even if the vast majority of customers defaulted on their 0% financing Microsoft would still come out ahead.

When Bank of America announced its deal to acquire Merrill Lynch in mid-September, we noted in this space that we were skeptical. Based on the research for our book, we thought Bank of America was making a classic mistake: focusing so much on the benefits of an acquisition that it glossed over the potential problems. Merrill seemed to be fraught with potential problems–and they are now coming into painfully clear focus

We are exceptionally sympathetic to the plight of General Motors. In researching 2,500 business failures over the past 25 years for our recent book, “Billion-Dollar Lessons,” we rarely came across an industry that faced as many challenges as the auto industry—and that was before the spike in gasoline prices turned car buyers away from GM’s profitable SUVs and the onset of current economic crisis dried up credit and forced potential customers to put their wallets away.

Given the onslaught from so many fronts, it’s hard to see what the right answer is for GM. It is, however, easier to identify wrong answers, and our research suggests strongly that acquiring Chrysler would be a disaster.

As we describe in the Engage section of our site, we’ve established a book club at Linked-In, the business-oriented social networking site.

We’ve just set up a “briefing materials” discussion thread there. It currently includes slides of a presentation recently given by Chunka to the Payments Strategy Forum and (for a time) a link to free reprints of our HBR article “Seven Ways to Fail Big,” which is drawn from our book. We’ll continue to add other materials over time. We hope that members will find these materials useful.

If you’ve not a member, click here to learn more. Membership is free.

Read Paul’s review of of Alice Schroeder’s “The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life” in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here is an excerpt:

While much of Mr. Buffett’s methods can’t be duplicated — genius is genius, after all — “The Snowball” usefully emphasizes a few core Buffett imperatives: taking a close look at an investment’s intrinsic value, making a brutal evaluation of its risks, and calculating a margin of safety. The book also underscores the importance of learning from failures. The Buffett-Munger approach is to “invert, always invert. Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What’s in it for the other guy? What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead.”

Here’s the link to the full article.

Even the most successful executives learn from failure. We were recently reminded of Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech, in which he “connects the dots” between several of his biggest failures, such as dropping out of college and being fired from Apple, to his greatest successes.

“Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories…”

Read the full speech. Watch it via youtube below.

Usually, when a synergy strategy falls flat, the people who put it together are pushed out and replaced by a team that unwinds the strategy, while deriding their predecessors as fools. Well, in the case of Internet conglomerate IAC, CEO Barry Diller has so much control that he didn’t just engineer the flawed strategy, which covered a wide range of businesses from financial services to dating services. Diller also is sticking around for the unwinding of that strategy. He recently held a pretty thoughtful interview with the Wall Street Journal, explaining how he got things wrong.

Diller says he realized IAC was “overly complex and unmanageable.” (That shows up in our research as one of the most commonly overlooked problems. The complications that come with scale can, by the way, be foreseen and assessed before a strategy to achieve scale is pursued.) He adds that “every mistake we’ve made in acquisitions has been outside our essential spheres of expertise”–underscoring the difficulties that we found when companies thought they were moving into an adjacent market, only to find that the new market is too different from the existing market where they operate.

Netflix’s recent announcement that it will sell Disney and CBS television exemplifies how Netflix is avoiding the major strategic error that can occur when a company stays the course in the face of a serious threat.

In Netflix’s case, that threat is easy to see: At some point down the road, we’ll all stop getting our movies in the mail in little red envelopes. Instead, we’ll download our movies directly onto personal computers, televisions or mobile devices such as an iPod or a phone.

The temptation for Netflix is to hang onto DVDs and little red envelopes as long as possible.

Imagine being Lehman CEO Richard Fuld Jr., testifying in front of a hostile crowd at a House committee and being told, “If you haven’t discovered your role, you are the villain today.”

Here’s a technique for making sure you never wind up in such a hot seat, one that can also be used to diminish the possibility of any sort of public relations debacle:

Collect every bit of press coverage of the Lehman mess. At the first sign that your company or industry might be headed toward problems that could make news, take out the Lehman coverage and use it to remind yourself of how actions that seem plausible from inside a company can look surreal from an outsider’s perspective.

The departure of the latest CEO at Unisys brings back memories of perhaps the most disastrous attempt at consolidation in the history of the computer industry, a fiasco that is worth studying for any company that is considering taking advantage of the sharply lower stock prices to make its own attempt at consolidation.