Chunka Mui

What if, instead of trying to predict the future, we could just pick the one we want - and then invent it? Well, we can. This book describes seven stunning technological advances that will occur by 2050 and shows how to combine them, starting now, to build a future that will let billions thrive. The smartphone in your pocket could guide 120 million Apollo-era spacecraft to the moon and back, all at the same time. And whatever replaces that phone in 30 years will be a million times more powerful. Many other technologies are on similar trajectories, and the core tools of genomics - which let us understand and even manipulate genetic code - are actually improving far faster, with broad implications for our health, for the foods we eat, and for just about everything else. How can a person even visualize a MILLION-fold improvement over 30 years, let alone a series of them that will interact with each other in profound ways? The traditional approach has been to think in bite-sized increments, of perhaps three to five years, and to let the rest of the future take care of itself. The authors propose a different way. They propose to harness the future, not to just let it happen. They do the million-fold imagining for the reader, describing seven so-incredible-as-to-be-almost-magical technological building blocks that will be available to all of us in 2050. These building blocks-in computing, communication, information, genomics, energy, water, and transportation-are following what the authors have dubbed the Laws of Zero. The technologies are increasing in power so fast in cost that you can count on them heading toward zero(ish) cost over the next three decades, meaning that infinite(ish) amounts of those resources will be available. The book paints visions of how the world could look if we all start planning now and experiment our way toward taking full advantage of the technological marvels that will be available. The authors provide what they call "future histories" - short, provocative "news" articles set in 2050 that describe how key aspects of the world might look in areas such as transportation, health care, climate, and trust. It's easy to imagine falling into dystopian scenarios, a la those depicted in classics like 1984 and Brave New World. This book provides an optimistic vision of the future, very much grounded in facts and the lessons of history, while showing how individuals, companies, and governments can make this vision a reality. The authors aren't claiming they can predict the future. They very much abide by the oft-used line that "it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." No, rather than predict the future, they want to draw on a lesson they learned from personal computing pioneer Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." The authors want to invent a perfect future. More precisely, they want to help you invent it.

"An erudite anthem for large companies reshaping themselves to innovate and compete with agile startups."-- Kirkus Reviews A Kirkus Indie Books of the Month Selection and recipient of a Kirkus Star for "Exceptional Merit" "An important book for the boards and managements of every company dealing with the avalanche of technological change."-- Jack Greenberg, Chairman of Western Union and former CEO of McDonald's"This book's eight innovation rules represent the difference between big companies leveraging their assets or getting their assets whooped."-- Guy Kawasaki, Former chief evangelist of Apple and author of APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur"This is the best business book I've read in very many years. It absolutely nails how to and how not to innovate."-- Sam Hill, Author of Radical Marketing and former chief marketing officer at Booz Allen"Great work The more I read, the more I couldn't put it down."-- Philip Fasano, Executive vice president, Kaiser Permanente and Author of Transforming Health CareOverviewThe New Killer Apps reverses the conventional wisdom that start-ups are destined to out-innovate big, established businesses. Through crisp analysis and compelling case studies, Mui and Carroll show that this just isn't true. Or, at least, it need not be. Yes, small and agile beats big and slow, but big and agile beats anyone. This book offers a roadmap for how large companies can Think Big, Start Small and Learn Fast. In doing so, they can get out of their own way, take advantage of their natural assets, and vanquish both traditional competitors and upstarts by nurturing and unleashing their own killer apps. There's certainly a lot on the line. A perfect storm of technological innovation-combining smartphones and other mobile devices, ubiquitous cameras and sensors, social media and "big data" analytical tools-means that more than $36 trillion of stock-market value is up for what Mary Meeker at Kleiner Perkins is calling "reimagination." Large companies will either do the reimagining and lay claim to the markets of the future or will be reimagined out of existence. Table of ContentsForeword by James Madara, M. D., CEO, American Medical AssociationGETTING STARTEDIntroduction: A Road Map for Corporate Innovation- Big and Agile Beats AnyoneCase Study: Google Cars and $2 Trillion in Auto-Related Revenue Up for GrabsPHASE ONE: THINK BIGRule 1: Context Is Worth 80 IQ PointsRule 2: Embrace Your Doomsday ScenarioRule 3: Start with a Clean Sheet of PaperCase Study: Carmakers Must Take a New RoadPHASE TWO: START SMALLRule 4: First, Let's Kill All the Finance GuysRule 5: Get Everyone on the Same PageRule 6: Build a Basket of Killer OptionsCase Study: Auto Insurance in a World Without AccidentsPHASE THREE: LEARN FASTRule 7: A Demo Is Worth a Thousand Pages of a Business PlanRule 8: Remember the Devil's AdvocateCase Study: Are Hospitals DOA? ConclusionAfterword: Moving from Innovation to Invention

In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. Watson asked the man if he knew why he'd been called in. The man said he assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, "Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons". 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 again and again. There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn. Lesson One: The Cold Hard Facts Between 1981 and 2006, 423 major publicly held U. S. companies with combined assets totaling $1.5 trillion filed for bankruptcy. Hundreds more took huge write-offs, discontinued major operations, or were acquired under duress. Again and again, companies follow the same wrong-headed strategies that brought down businesses in the past. The sub-prime mortgage crisis that cost companies tens of billions of dollars in 2007 and 2008 echoes the ill-conceived strategies that pushed Green Tree Financial and Conseco into bankruptcy years earlier. Tom Watson's executive's $10 million lesson seems cheap by comparison. Lesson Two: Failure Patterns Carroll and Mui found that the number one cause of failure was misguided strategy-not sloppy execution, poor leadership, or bad luck. These strategic errors fall into seven categories, including: pursuing nonexistent synergies: Quaker Oats' purchase of Snapple was supposed to capitalize on distribution synergies but instead led to a $1.7 billion write-off; moving into an "adjacent" market that isn't really adjacent: Avon decided its "culture of caring" qualified it to operate retirement homes. Subsequent write-offs totaled $545 million; and, buying more problems than efficiencies through misguided consolidation: Despite pioneering the discount department store years before Sam Walton came along, Ames Department Stores flubbed consolidation efforts, landing in bankruptcy twice before eventually liquidating. Lesson Three: Avoid Making the Same Mistakes But there's light at the end of the tunnel: "Billion-Dollar Lessons" provides proven methods that managers, boards, and even investors can adopt to avoid making the same mistakes. While there's no way to guarantee success, this book draws on vivid, off-the-beaten-track examples to help you avoid failure by showing you how to thoroughly assess potentially disastrous strategies before they bring your company down. Required Reading: Think of "Billion-Dollar Lessons" as the flip side of Good to Great, but just as eye-opening and essential as that business classic. There's enormous value in learning from companies that lost millions (if not billions) in pursuit of strategies that led to spectacular flameouts. Everyone makes mistakes, but why make the same mistakes over and over?

The authors examine the convergence of digital technologies, products and services which form 'killer apps' that transform industries, redefine markets and annihilate the competition, as well as looking at how to transform a company into one where the production of a 'killer app' becomes a real possiblity.