Saturday, January 24, 2009

A Business Book for the Times


Business Book for the Times

I read a lot of business books. Ok, I admit that I START a lot of business books and read them in parallel on my Kindle, plinking away as a I get time, and don't finish a lot of business books. But the one I've started reading this week is a winner, and I highly recommend it. It's called Billion-Dollar Lessons, and it's about business failures. Yes, that right, failures. Most business books look at successful business and how to emulate their triumph. This books looks at a series of disasters and talks about how to avoid them. The approach is useful, both because it explains the danger signs of a disaster in the making for an employee of a large company or an investor, and because all of us have a psychological tendency to be captivated by train wrecks. The books goes through one financial train wreck after another, what led up to it, how it played out, who got hurt. It's depressing to read how many financial train wrecks hurt the investors/passengers when the engineers/executives/salesman have long since jumped off for a soft cushy landing on bags of money.

Highly recommended. I may even read this one all the way to the end.


and the Kindle edition: 

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