Paul B Carroll

"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?