We had the pleasure recently to do a Q&A with Guy Kawasaki on our book. You can read it at Guy’s How to Change the World Blog.

We mourn the passing of our friend, Mike Hammer.  Mike had unique insights in both technology and business, as demonstrated by a career that ranged from being a tenured professor in computer science at MIT to being the driving force behind “business process reengineering.”  His first book, “Reengineering the Corporation,” remains a business standard.  More [...]

Leigh Buchanan at Inc. Magazine has written a review of Billion-Dollar Lessons in that magazine’s September issue.

While consultants may get paid big bucks for their advice, two consultancies’ merger dealings show judgment that is, at best, suspect.

“Seven Ways to Fail Big,” our companion article to Billion-Dollar Lessons, appears in the September issue of the Harvard Business Review. An audio slide show presentation is also available.

All the merger talk in the airline industry reminds us of many of the consolidation stories in our research–stories in which a perfectly rational argument could be made that there needed to be fewer players in a maturing industry, but in which those companies that tried to lead the consolidation got clobbered. So, we take it as a good sign that British Airways, American Airlines and Iberia Airlines are forming an alliance that will provide many of the benefits of consolidation without forcing them to go through the mess that has historically been associated with airline mergers.

While our whole premise for this blog and the book that spawned it is that too few people try to learn lessons from failure, there are a few books that have looked at specific kinds of failure and teased out the lessons. Some of these books are well worth reading. We’ll highlight some in this [...]

When we started writing this blog, a friend challenged us: “So, what strategies will work? You tell me about all these ideas that aren’t going to pan out. What deals do you like?”
We actually like a lot of deals. We’ll start today with the Waste Management proposal to buy Republic Services for $6.73 billion.
When [...]

A recent post at Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational Blog about Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment reminds us of a cynical moment during our research for Billion-Dollar Lessons when we concluded that, too often, marketing is when companies lie to their customers, and market research is when companies lie to themselves.

When things go bad, it’s easy to blame the CEO. Often, that blame is deserved. Still, it’s worth noting the intense pressure that CEOs are under to pursue strategies that eventually, perhaps inevitably, lead their companies to failure.
Take the case of Freddie Mac, the large mortgage finance company that has lost more than $80B, or [...]