After graduating from Michigan State University at age 19, Paul earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. He spent a year as an editor at his hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, then joined the Wall Street Journal. He spent 17 years at the Journal, in the U.S., Europe and Mexico, getting about as broad an exposure to the world of business as the paper could provide. The paper nominated him twice for Pulitzer Prizes. He was a finalist in 1996 for his coverage of the crisis that followed Mexico’s devaluation of its peso.

During his time at the Journal, Paul wrote “Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM,” about the cultural constipation that left IBM behind competitors in the late 1980s and early 1990s and that had many worried about its prospects for long-term survival. Published in 1993, the book was a best-seller, generating so much interest that Paul appeared on “The Today Show” and scores of other radio and TV shows in the U.S. and Canada. The book was reviewed—and praised—by almost every major business publication in the U.S. It was cited by publications as diverse as the New York Times and the China Times in Taiwan as one of the best books of the year. In the wake of the book, Paul gave talks throughout the Western Hemisphere on how to avoid the mistakes that made IBM mishandle the PC revolution and have its decision-making slow to a crawl.

Paul left the Journal in 1996 to become a partner with Diamond Management & Technology Consultants. He founded and edited Context magazine, which was published by Diamond and which helped an audience of 40,000 senior executives understand how information technology could change their businesses. Launched in 1997, Context became the first of the “new economy” magazines, to be followed by Industry Standard, Business 2.0 and a host of others. Context won numerous awards and was a finalist in 2000 for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the industry’s highest honor. (Archives are at www.contextmag.com.)

After leaving Diamond in 2003, Paul began work on the years-long project that became “Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years.” Perhaps because of his time covering the near-death experience at IBM and the peso crisis in Mexico, Paul became aware of a gap in business books. Lots of books looked at success stories and said, “Here’s how to be like those guys.” But almost no one looked at failures and said, “Here’s how not to be like those guys.” The focus on success seemed to be akin to interviewing all the winners at a roulette table and assuming that following their strategies would produce similar successes; to truly understand how to win—or whether winning is even likely—it’s crucial to look at both winners and losers. So, Paul and his old colleague and friend from Diamond, Chunka Mui, set out on the major research effort into failures that has produced their current book.

Based on the principles developed for the book, and drawing on the extensive consulting backgrounds of Chunka and some other colleagues, Paul has begun consulting to major organizations on how to spot strategy problems while it’s still possible to fix them or to kill the strategy entirely.

In his free time—what there is of it—Paul spends a lot of time standing at the rail at horse shows, on soccer fields and on ski slopes, watching his daughters compete. He enjoys himself greatly. He lives with his wife, Kim, and daughters in Granite Bay, Calif.