When we remodeled our homes some years back, we decided that the most expensive words known to man were, “While we’re at it. . . .” In doing the research for our book, though, we realized that the words, “Well, we have to do something,” have caused far more damage.

Executives convince themselves that, no matter what, they have to achieve some stock-price goal, some market-share goal, some profit goal. So, they lay out a strategy that might work and roll the dice, even when the odds are stacked against them. In other words, they take what they think is their best bet even though an objective review would show they aren’t making a good bet. Often, they lose.

Sometimes, they lose billions—making us feel a bit better about those bad thousand-dollar decisions we made while remodeling.

We’ve updated “Perfecting the Art of the Deal,” a working paper that applies our research to potential mergers and acquisitions. Read the introduction below and click to download the entire article in PDF form.

We’ve long been believers that corporate leaders can draw important lessons from decision-making at the highest levels of government. That’s because corporate decision-making is often poorly documented; companies tend to move on as quickly as possible. By contrast, while important political decisions are initially opaque, they tend to be the object of dogged reporting and multiple memoirs. Thus, learning can actually happen.

In that vein, Bob Woodward has offered an interesting set of management lessons that President Obama can draw from the Bush presidency. Woodward’s lessons are very consistent with our recommendations in Billion-Dollar Lessons and worthwhile for corporate leaders to ponder. We list the lessons below, and point you to Woodward’s Washington Post article for a fuller treatment. We’ve also snapped several clips from Woodward’s recent appearance on the Charlie Rose show, which adds some color to his article.

Chunka Mui gave the closing keynote at the recent annual meeting of NIRI, the National Investor Relations Institute. Following that address, he engaged in a wide-ranging interview conducted by Michael Santoli, a senior editor of Barron’s. Santoli writes the “Streetwise” column, offering a forward-looking take on the financial markets, illuminating market trends and themes and identifying investment opportunities. Below is the video of that interview, divided into five parts.

With Steve Jobs much in the news, we thought it worthwhile to highlight an earlier entry, “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish,” that gives some insight into the man.

It’s rare that discussions of our research don’t touch on how executive compensation can distort strategic decision making. As we report in “Billion-Dollar Lessons,” our research turned up numerous examples where compensation schemes exacerbated risk taking. Dealmakers and investment bankers, for example, are rewarded based on the deals they close rather than long-term performance, so many fell prey to an IBG YBG attitude (I’ll be gone; you’ll be gone). Too many used easy financing to do deals that could not withstand the test of time. Executives, loaded up with stock options that had tremendous upside for success but little downside for failure, pushed forward on huge investments that had little chance of success. So, you might expect we’d support efforts to limit executive compensation, such as the administration’s recent appointment of an “executive pay czar” to oversee companies receiving federal bailout money.

But we don’t.

While we appreciate the value of information technology, we think that too often it hinders collaboration and thoughtful decision making. An article in yesterday’s New York Times, “Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners,” reminded us of how technology can inhibit group processes–and how a flip of a switch can sometimes dispel the distractions.

Here’s a video excerpt containing the opening segment of a presentation by Chunka Mui at a recent Stanford Breakfast Briefing.  The audience consisted of approximately 100 members of the Stanford and Silicon Valley business communities. You can get a DVD of the complete presentation through Kantola Productions, the series producer. Zack Urlocker attended the presentation and blogged about it here and here.

The Stanford Breakfast Briefing series is a monthly business forum that features prominent thought leaders; CEO’s, professors and authors who share their expertise and research to help solve critical issues. It is held at the Stanford Faculty Club on the second Wednesday of every month.

As we wrote in our recent white paper, “Beyond Fear and Greed: Capitalizing on Opportunities in the Current Crisis,” immense opportunities await companies with the stability and wherewithal to take advantage of the recession and their competitors’ adversity. China seems to agree with us. Although some people have reasoned that the global downturn would hurt Chinese companies because they depend so much on exports, and would perhaps even cause political instability in the country, recent articles say Chinese companies are trying to take advantage of the crisis by being aggressive.

While we doubt the wisdom of having IBM buy Sun, we’re intrigued by Big Blue’s recent announcement that it is going to sell systems that will monitor water resources [see 1, 2, 3]. Water systems are leaky enough and, in general, inefficient enough that better management could provide significant benefits, and the Obama administration’s economic-recovery plan will make sure that funds are available. IBM already has relationships with many of the municipalities that will be the buyers. It has the expertise to handle such complex sales. It also has the professional services capabilities to help install and manage the systems.