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Billion Dollar Lessons
- What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last Twenty-five Years
- Narrated by: Jim Bond
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
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Publisher's summary
In Billion Dollar Lessons, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 business failures to reveal the misguided tactics that mire companies over and over. There are thousands of books about successful companies, but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn.
Billion Dollar Lessons provides proven methods that managers, boards, and even investors can adopt to avoid making the same mistakes. It draws on vivid examples to help you thoroughly assess potentially disastrous strategies before they bring your company down.
Think of Billion Dollar Lessons as the flip side of Good to Great, but just as eye opening and essential as that business classic. Billion Dollar Lessons will keep you from going from good to gone.
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When pioneering business journalist and Inc. magazine editor at large Bo Burlingham wrote Small Giants, it became an instant classic for its original take on a common business problem - how to handle the pressure to grow. Now Burlingham is back to tackle an even more common problem - how to exit your company well. Sooner or later, all entrepreneurs leave their businesses and all businesses get sold, given away, or liquidated.
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Begin with the end in mind
- By D. Hartzell on 02-05-15
By: Bo Burlingham
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The Self-Made Billionaire Effect
- How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
- By: John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.
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Waste of time!
- By Anonymous User on 05-30-20
By: John Sviokla, and others
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Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick
- People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds
- By: Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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To make these big moves happen for your company, you’re going to have to break through inertia, gamesmanship, and risk aversion. You’re going to have to mitigate human biases and manage group dynamics. Eight practical shifts can help you do this, and unlock bigger, bolder, better strategies. This is not another by-the-book approach to strategy. It’s not another trudge through frameworks or small-scale case studies promising a secret formula for success. It’s an irreverent, fact-driven, and humorous take on the real world of strategic decision making.
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Ok beginning, superb finish
- By Rancher on 01-01-21
By: Chris Bradley, and others
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Machine, Platform, Crowd
- Harnessing Our Digital Future
- By: Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson predicted some of the far-reaching effects of digital technologies on our lives and businesses. Now they’ve written a guide to help listeners make the most of our collective future. Machine | Platform | Crowd outlines the opportunities and challenges inherent in the science fiction technologies that have come to life in recent years, like self-driving cars and 3D printers, online platforms for renting outfits and scheduling workouts, or crowd-sourced medical research and financial instruments.
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Both How AND Why for Techies
- By Dan Collins on 08-11-17
By: Erik Brynjolfsson, and others
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Car Guys vs. Bean Counters
- The Battle for the Soul of American Business
- By: Bob Lutz
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2001, General Motors hired Bob Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. He launched a war against penny pinching, office politics, turf wars, and risk avoidance. After declaring bankruptcy during the recession of 2008, GM is back on track thanks to its embrace of Lutz's philosophy. When Lutz got into the auto business in the early sixties, CEOs knew that if you captured the public's imagination with great cars, the money would follow.
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Opinionated and one-sided
- By Michael Parks on 06-23-11
By: Bob Lutz
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Angel Investing
- The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups
- By: David S. Rose
- Narrated by: David S. Rose
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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From building your reputation as a smart investor, to negotiating fair deals, adding value to your portfolio companies and helping them implement smart exit strategies, David provides both the fundamental strategies and the specific tools you need to take full advantage of this rapidly growing asset class.
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Very enlightening
- By Keith L. on 04-06-15
By: David S. Rose
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Winning with Data
- Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future
- By: Tomasz Tunguz, Frank Bien
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Winning with Data explores the cultural changes big data brings to business, and shows you how to adapt your organization to leverage data to maximum effect. Authors Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien draw on extensive background in big data, business intelligence, and business strategy to provide a blueprint for companies looking to move head-on into the data wave. Instrumentation is discussed in detail, but the core of the change is in the culture.
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Content marketing
- By Adam Winn on 12-22-16
By: Tomasz Tunguz, and others
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything
- How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data
- By: Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, Ben Pring
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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What to Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on artificial intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans, it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete.
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Assumes that machine learning will grow very slow
- By Nathan Burnham on 05-06-17
By: Malcolm Frank, and others
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The Supply Chain Revolution
- Innovative Sourcing and Logistics for a Fiercely Competitive World
- By: Suman Sarkar
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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When CEOs think about the supply chain, it's usually to cut costs. But the smartest leaders see supply chain and sourcing for what they can be: hidden tools for outperforming the competition. Steve Jobs, upon returning to Apple in 1997, focused on transforming the supply chain. He hired Tim Cook - and the company sped up the development of new products, getting them into consumers' hands faster. The rest is history.
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informative but dry
- By Justin on 01-01-18
By: Suman Sarkar
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The Wide Lens
- A New Strategy for Innovation
- By: Ron Adner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 6 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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How can great companies do everything right - identify real customer needs, deliver excellent innovations, beat their competitors to market - and still fail? The sad truth is that many companies fail because they focus too intensely on their own innovations, and then neglect the innovation ecosystems on which their success depends. In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners - some visible, some hidden - deliver on their promises, too.
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Great book
- By Kindle Customer on 12-25-21
By: Ron Adner
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The House of Dimon
- How JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon Rose to the Top of the Financial World
- By: Patricia Crisafulli
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Jamie Dimon is Wall Street's biggest player. Following the 11h-hour rescue of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, his profile has reached stratospheric levels. And while the deals and decisions he's made have usually turned out to be the right ones, his journey to the top of the financial world has been anything but easy. Now, in The House of Dimon, business writer Patricia Crisafulli goes behind the scenes to recount the amazing events that have shaped Dimon's career.
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Intriguing
- By Jean on 08-28-16
What listeners say about Billion Dollar Lessons
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mark
- 06-26-20
Very informative! Great book!
The book is extremely informative. What I liked about it the most was that it was more about failures than successes.
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- Cynthia
- 05-05-14
Predictions are Hard - Especially about the Future
Think "Predictions are Hard - Especially about the Future" is is a Yogi Berra quote? Actually, it's first (but disputably) attributed to Nobel-prize winning physicist Niels Bohr (1885 - 1965) used by authors Paul B. Carroll, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui in their 2009 business and economics book, "Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years."
"Billion-Dollar Lessons" is a compendium of MBA-level case studies of abject, huge failures - like Kodak"s failure to recognize digital technology and cameras would make its products and services as obsolete as the Pony Express. Rather than adapt to a new reality, Kodak convinced itself that the threat wasn't real - and its shareholders suffered. This book discusses the individual psychological factors and group think that caused Kodak, collectively, to let itself be pushed off the proverbial cliff.
This book relies heavily on quotes from Berkshire-Hathaway's Warren Buffet. The quotes are anecdotally on point, but could have taken it much further. For example, in Part I, the authors discuss how the benefits and cost savings of synergy, or adjacent acquisition, only work about 1/3 of the time. (Translation for the NOT prematurely grey: When I was in undergraduate B-school in the 1980's, the terms were. 'vertical integration' or 'horizontal integration', and the success rate was about the same). Berkshire- Hathaway's holdings run independently of each other, and Carroll and Mui don't contrast Buffet's success with the many failures the authors found late in the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st. Sure, Helzberg Diamonds might be romantic - but they aren't selling See's Candy.
A more apt Bohr quote, given the topic, is "An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field."
As quoted by Edward Teller, in Dr. Edward Teller's Magnificent Obsession by Robert Coughlan, in LIFE magazine (6 September 1954), p. 62.
The narration - well, as much as I am fascinated by the topic, and as well organized as the book is - was a sure fire way to put me to sleep in 15 minutes or less. I know, because I use the Audible timer, and invariably had to rewind to where I drifted off.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Sami
- 10-30-14
Great lessons to learn
This is surely one of the memorable books I have read. The analysis goes into different levels and tracks real lessons from these misfortunes. Although I would argue that some of the assumptions for losses were too simplified, I find it interesting and logical reasons that surely assist in the fall of these companies.
A great read for the business minded and not to miss.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Dennis Lamkin
- 02-08-20
Great lessons every business owner should learn
Great stories, I’m sure there will be a follow-up
Including Sears, Pier 1, Montgomery Ward and a dozen more. Great read.
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- Sam
- 09-21-18
Stories are hard to follow
A lot of stories from the 70’s through the early 2000’s. Couldn’t follow that good.
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- Alex B.
- 06-06-23
Overall just, meh
There was nothing inherently good about this book. It came recommended from a fellow entrepreneur it it definitely missed the mark for me. The reader seemed unenthusiastic the entire time which made a difficult read even worse.
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