Bruce Greenwald, one of the nation’s leading business professors, presents a new and simplified approach to strategy that cuts through much of the fog that has surrounded the subject. Based on his hugely popular course at Columbia Business School, Greenwald and his coauthor, Judd Kahn, offer an easy-to-follow method for understanding the competitive structure of your industry and developing an appropriate strategy for your specific position.
Over the last two decades, the conventional approach to strategy has become frustratingly complex. It’s easy to get lost in a sophisticated model of your competitors, suppliers, buyers, substitutes, and other players, while losing sight of the big question: Are there barriers to entry that allow you to do things that other firms cannot?

The system design interview is considered to be the most complex and most difficult technical job interview by many. Those questions are intimidating, but don’t worry. It's just that nobody has taken the time to prepare you systematically.
We take the time.
We go slow.
We draw lots of diagrams and use lots of examples.
You'll learn step-by-step, one question at a time.
Don’t miss out.
What’s inside?
- An insider’s take on what interviewers really look for and why.
- A 4-step framework for solving any system design interview question.
- 16 real system design interview questions with detailed solutions.
- 188 diagrams to visually explain how different systems work.

"Digital Design and Computer Architecture" takes a unique and modern approach to digital design. Beginning with digital logic gates and progressing to the design of combinational and sequential circuits, Harris and Harris use these fundamental building blocks as the basis for what follows: the design of an actual MIPS processor. SystemVerilog and VHDL are integrated throughout the text in examples illustrating the methods and techniques for CAD-based circuit design. By the end of this book, readers will be able to build their own microprocessor and will have a top-to-bottom understanding of how it works. Harris and Harris have combined an engaging and humorous writing style with an updated and hands-on approach to digital design. This second edition has been updated with new content on I/O systems in the context of general purpose processors found in a PC as well as microcontrollers found almost everywhere. The new edition provides practical examples of how to interface with peripherals using RS232, SPI, motor control, interrupts, wireless, and analog-to-digital conversion. High-level descriptions of I/O interfaces found in PCs include USB, SDRAM, WiFi, PCI Express, and others. In addition to expanded and updated material throughout, SystemVerilog is now featured in the programming and code examples (replacing Verilog), alongside VHDL. This new edition also provides additional exercises and a new appendix on C programming to strengthen the connection between programming and processor architecture. It covers the fundamentals of digital logic design and reinforces logic concepts through the design of a MIPS microprocessor. It features side-by-side examples of the two most prominent Hardware Description Languages (HDLs)-SystemVerilog and VHDL - which illustrate and compare the ways each can be used in the design of digital systems. It includes examples throughout the text that enhance the reader's understanding and retention of key concepts and techniques. Companion Web site includes links to CAD tools for FPGA design from Altera and Mentor Graphics, lecture slides, laboratory projects, and solutions to exercises. Updated based on instructor feedback with more exercises and new examples of parallel and advanced architectures, practical I/O applications, embedded systems, and heterogeneous computing. It presents digital system design examples in both VHDL and SystemVerilog (updated for the second edition from Verilog), shown side-by-side to compare and contrast their strengths. It includes a new chapter on C programming to provide necessary prerequisites and strengthen the connection between programming and processor architecture. Instructors can also register at textbooks.elsevier.com for access to: solutions to all exercises (PDF); lab materials with solutions; HDL for textbook examples and exercise solutions; Lecture slides (PPT); Sample exams\ Sample course syllabus; and figures from the text (JPG, PPT).

Walter Bagehot's "Lombard Street", published in 1873 in the wake of a devastating London bank collapse, explained in clear and straightforward terms why central banks must serve as the lender of last resort to ensure liquidity in a faltering credit system. Bagehot's book set down the principles that helped define the role of modern central banks, particularly in times of crisis - but the recent global financial meltdown has posed unforeseen challenges. "The New Lombard Street" lays out the innovative principles needed to address the instability of today's markets and to rebuild our financial system. Revealing how we arrived at the current crisis, Perry Mehrling traces the evolution of ideas and institutions in the American banking system since the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913. He explains how the Fed took classic central banking wisdom from Britain and Europe and adapted it to America's unique and considerably more volatile financial conditions. Mehrling demonstrates how the Fed increasingly found itself serving as the dealer of last resort to ensure the liquidity of securities markets - most dramatically amid the recent financial crisis. Now, as fallout from the crisis forces the Fed to adapt in unprecedented ways, new principles are needed to guide it. In "The New Lombard Street", Mehrling persuasively argues for a return to the classic central bankers' 'money view', which looks to the money market to assess risk and restore faith in our financial system.

Donald J. Trump is an icon: the very definition of the American success story. The star of The Apprentice and developer of some of the planet's most prestigious real estate, he's been on the bottom and risen to become one of the world's wealthiest men.
Bill Zanker started The Learning Annex with $5,000 and grew it into a $5 million a year company. That was before he met Donald Trump. Thirty months later, after Zanker learned to think BIG himself, The Learning Annex is generating over $100 million a year in sales--and still growing.
Together, they're living examples of how thinking BIG and knowing when to back up your opinions aggressively--regardless of what your critics or opponents might say--can help you maximize your personal and professional achievements. For the first time ever, you too can learn Trump's secrets to thinking BIG and kicking ass.

"What kinds of investors actually choose to make their living by seeking out troubled companies and becoming mired in the complexities and contentiousness of a bankruptcy or out-of-court workout?" - Hilary Rosenberg (from The Vulture Investors)

Welcome to the big-time, big-stress-and big-profit-world of vulture investing. From the eleventh-hour save of Donald Trump's casinos, to the tempestuous history of Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, to the rocky restructuring of the massive Revco discount drugstore chain, Hilary Rosenberg takes us on a fast-moving journey through some of the major bankruptcies of the 1980s and 1990s-and brings to life the infamous, talented arbiters at the heart of their recovery. Meet the so-called "vulture investors" who cast their sights on distressed concerns, buy out debt, and skillfully forge their way to rich returns. Quietly upstaging the flashier corporate tycoons and raiders of the previous decade, men like Leon Black, Ronald LaBow, Sam Zell, Talton Embry, and Martin Whitman have helped to make a more efficient market in this obscure sector of investment, and their success may even inspire the quickly evolving business cultures of Asia and Latin America.

The vulture investors made their way to the forefront of American business during the troubled period when declaring bankruptcy became commonplace among debt-heavy companies. Buying out debt and seeing through the rehabilitation of companies as well-known as Sunbeam and Bloomingdale's, these unique players have changed the face of the distressed securities market. In her own animated, absorbing, and original style, Hilary Rosenberg creates thoroughly researched reenactments of the vultures' greatest exploits to offer an intriguing examination of their methods and their madness-and reveals the important role of these controversial characters in aiding worldwide economic recovery.

Praise for The Vulture Investors

"A lively account of the hardy band of investors who look for-and find-gold in capitalism's junk pile. Rosenberg not only tells their stories with captivating relish but weighs the overall economic impact of their exploits. This book is a valuable introduction to 1990s-style deal-making." - Chris Welles, Senior Editor, Business Week

"In a tour de force of punchy business writing, Rosenberg dissects a little-known but increasingly common high-stakes financial game: preying on companies in distress. . . . The author relates these intricate, suspenseful narratives in a clear, lively style that always instructs and often amuses." - Publishers Weekly

"Reads like a good suspense novel." - Library Journal

Combines biography of M. Sanger with social history of birth control movement. Winner of Bancroft Prize in American History 1971 and John Gilmary Shea Award of American Catholic Historical Association 1970.

From the bestselling author of The Everything Store, an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.
Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon, an internet pioneer quietly changing the way we shop online, in his bestseller The Everything Store. But ever since, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to well over a trillion dollars. Jeff Bezos’s empire, once housed in a garage, now spans the globe. Between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, it’s impossible to go a day without encountering its impact. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.
In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents a deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. With unprecedented access to current and former executives, employees, regulators, and critics, Stone shows how seismic changes inside the company over the past decade led to dramatic innovations, as well as to missteps that turned public sentiment against its sharp-elbowed business practices and gameshow treatment of its search for a second headquarters.
Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself—who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions; who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids. As his empire expands, the book investigates how Bezos gradually pulled away from day-to-day activities at Amazon to focus on his many interests outside of it, announcing his momentous transition from CEO to executive chairman.
Definitive, timely, and revelatory, Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.

In industry after industry, data, analytics, and AI-driven processes are transforming the nature of work. While we often still treat AI as the domain of a specific skill, business function, or sector, we have entered a new era in which AI is challenging the very concept of the firm. AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.
Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have constrained business growth for hundreds of years. From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft to Amazon, research shows how AI-driven processes are vastly more scalable than traditional processes, drive massive scope increase, enabling companies to straddle industry boundaries, and enable powerful opportunities for learning--to drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions.
When traditional operating constraints are removed, strategy becomes a whole new game, one whose rules and likely outcomes this book will make clear. Iansiti and Lakhani:
Present a framework for rethinking business and operating models
Explain how "collisions" between AI-driven/digital and traditional/analog firms are reshaping competition and altering the structure of our economy
Show how these collisions force traditional companies to change their operating models to drive scale, scope, and learning
Explain the risks involved in operating model transformation and how to overcome them
Describe the new challenges and responsibilities for the leaders of these firms
Packed with examples--including the most powerful and innovative global, AI-driven competitors--and based on research in hundreds of firms across many sectors, this is the essential guide for rethinking how your firm competes and operates in the era of AI.

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust-despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing a growing need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides. In a new foreword to this edition of The Silent World of Doctor and Patient, Alexander Morgan Capron outlines the changes in medical ethics practice that have occurred since the book was first published in 1984, paying particular attention to the hotly debated issues of physician-assisted suicide and informed consent in managed care.

Mutual fund superstar Peter Lynch and author John Rothchild explain the basic principles of the stock market and business in an investing guide that will enlighten and entertain anyone who is high school age or older.

Many investors, including some with substantial portfolios, have only the sketchiest idea of how the stock market works. The reason, say Lynch and Rothchild, is that the basics of investing—the fundamentals of our economic system and what they have to do with the stock market—aren’t taught in school. At a time when individuals have to make important decisions about saving for college and 401(k) retirement funds, this failure to provide a basic education in investing can have tragic consequences.

For those who know what to look for, investment opportunities are everywhere. The average high school student is familiar with Nike, Reebok, McDonald’s, the Gap, and The Body Shop. Nearly every teenager in America drinks Coke or Pepsi, but only a very few own shares in either company or even understand how to buy them. Every student studies American history, but few realize that our country was settled by European colonists financed by public companies in England and Holland—and the basic principles behind public companies haven’t changed in more than three hundred years.

In Learn to Earn , Lynch and Rothchild explain in a style accessible to anyone who is high school age or older how to read a stock table in the daily newspaper, how to understand a company annual report, and why everyone should pay attention to the stock market. They explain not only how to invest, but also how to think like an investor.

"Today, Mr. Minsky's view [of economics] is more relevant than ever."- The New York Times "Indeed, the Minsky moment has become a fashionable catch phrase on Wall Street."-The Wall Street Journal John Maynard Keynes offers a timely reconsideration of the work of the revered economics icon. Hyman Minsky argues that what most economists consider Keynesian economics is at odds with the major points of Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes and Minsky refuse to ignore pervasive uncertainty. Once uncertainty is given center stage, recurring episodes of financial system crises are all but inescapable. As Robert Barbera notes in a new preface, "Benign economic circumstances!invite increasingly aggressive financial market wagers. Innovation in finance is a signature development in a capitalist economy. Once leveraged wagers are in place, small disappointments can have exaggerated consequences." Thus for Minsky economic calm on Main Street engenders financial system fragility which, in turn, ensures a perpetuation of boom and bust cycles. Minsky colleagues Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray write in a new introduction, "We offer this new edition, in the hope that it will contribute to the reformation of economic theory so that it can address the world in which we actually live-the world that was always the topic of Minsky's analysis."

An engaging guide to excelling in today's venture capital arena Beginning in 2005, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, managing directors at Foundry Group, wrote a long series of blog posts describing all the parts of a typical venture capital Term Sheet: a document which outlines key financial and other terms of a proposed investment. Since this time, they've seen the series used as the basis for a number of college courses, and have been thanked by thousands of people who have used the information to gain a better understanding of the venture capital field. Drawn from the past work Feld and Mendelson have written about in their blog and augmented with newer material, Venture Capital Financings puts this discipline in perspective and lays out the strategies that allow entrepreneurs to excel in their start-up companies. Page by page, this book discusses all facets of the venture capital fundraising process. Along the way, Feld and Mendelson touch on everything from how valuations are set to what externalities venture capitalists face that factor into entrepreneurs' businesses. Includes a breakdown analysis of the mechanics of a Term Sheet and the tactics needed to negotiate Details the different stages of the venture capital process, from starting a venture and seeing it through to the later stages Explores the entire venture capital ecosystem including those who invest in venture capitalist Contain standard documents that are used in these transactions Written by two highly regarded experts in the world of venture capital The venture capital arena is a complex and competitive place, but with this book as your guide, you'll discover what it takes to make your way through it.
Q&A with Co-Authors Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Co-Author Jason Mendelson I understand that VCs have primarily four functions they perform: raising funds, screening and investing in new businesses, managing current portfolio companies and some level of investor relations and internal operations. How do you divide your work day?
One of the great things about this job is that there is no “standard day.” Every day is different and the division of time reflects that. It's really hard to say what a typical day is like. Even typical weeks are hard to describe. It all depends on a particular partner's portfolio is doing and what their role is in the firm.
Some partners have operational responsibilities internal to the firm itself, some don't. In short, you could ask 100 VCs this answer and have 100 different answers. If you forced me to put some percentages on the table, I'd say a normal yearly time allocation (assuming that fundraising is not happening) might look something like this:
Screening, Analysis and Execution: 45%
Current Company monitoring: 45%
Investor Relations / Operations / Other: 10%
With a number of great companies being born of ideas coming from a youthful group of entrepreneurs, what advice do you have for the young person seeking to build a team of "time-tested, battle-hardened" professionals?
We think young-entrepreneurs are great. In fact, we like spending time with the younger set so much that we are active mentors and investors with Techstars. And certainly with our fund, we wouldn't hesitate to fund a first-time entrepreneur with a great idea.
Co-Author Brad Feld
I think the key to being a young entrepreneur is being self aware. Know what you know and also know what you don't. If you can communicate to a prospective investor that you are smart, have a great idea AND are emotionally intelligent and realize what other skills sets you'll need to surround yourself with, then I don't think being young and / or inexperienced will hurt your chances. In fact, youthful exuberance is infectious and sometimes younger folks will think outside the box more often than older ones who are set in their ways.
Are you aware of any VCs that have funded founders that have failed at their previous ventures?
Absolutely. Me! And many other VCs. Failure is a normal part of entrepreneurship which I've written about extensively in my blog.
My favorite entrepreneurs to fund are those that have had at least one success and one failure. While it is a cliche, failure teaches the big lessons. Most importantly, entrepreneurs that have some failure under their belt have humility and perspective that I think is deeply useful in the creation of the company.
There is a perspective – promoted by some people – that the best serial entrepreneurs have never been unsuccessful. This is a myth – the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs who I know have a long string of failures in their past.
Why don't VCs invest in real estate?
We don’t invest in real estate because we don’t know what we are doing in that market. Okay, that was a little glib, but it’s true. VCs don’t / shouldn’t invest in sectors and themes that they don’t understand. Outside of some folks that I know who made some shrewd residential moves with their personal properties, I’d not want to trust my money to a VC doing a pure-play real estate deal.

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas.
In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes—from the French publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth—How We Got to Now investigates the secret history behind the everyday objects of contemporary life.
In his trademark style, Johnson examines unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields: how the invention of air-conditioning enabled the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species—to cities such as Dubai or Phoenix, which would otherwise be virtually uninhabitable; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; and how clean water made it possible to manufacture computer chips. Accompanied by a major six-part television series on PBS, How We Got to Now is the story of collaborative networks building the modern world, written in the provocative, informative, and engaging style that has earned Johnson fans around the globe.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, NAMED BY THE TIMES AS ONE OF "6 BOOKS TO HELP UNDERSTAND TRUMP'S WIN"
"You will not read a more important book about America this year."—The Economist
"A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal
"Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.
But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.
A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

The practice of charging interest on loans has been controversial since it was first mentioned in early recorded history. Lending is a powerful economic tool, vital to the development of society but it can also lead to disaster if left unregulated. Prohibitions against excessive interest, or usury, have been found in almost all societies since antiquity. Whether loans were made in kind or in cash, creditors often were accused of beggar-thy-neighbor exploitation when their lending terms put borrowers at risk of ruin. While the concept of usury reflects transcendent notions of fairness, its definition has varied over time and place: Roman law distinguished between simple and compound interest, the medieval church banned interest altogether, and even Adam Smith favored a ceiling on interest. But in spite of these limits, the advantages and temptations of lending prompted financial innovations from margin investing and adjustable-rate mortgages to credit cards and microlending. In Beggar Thy Neighbor, financial historian Charles R. Geisst tracks the changing perceptions of usury and debt from the time of Cicero to the most recent financial crises. This comprehensive economic history looks at humanity's attempts to curb the abuse of debt while reaping the benefits of credit. Beggar Thy Neighbor examines the major debt revolutions of the past, demonstrating that extensive leverage and debt were behind most financial market crashes from the Renaissance to the present day. Geisst argues that usury prohibitions, as part of the natural law tradition in Western and Islamic societies, continue to play a key role in banking regulation despite modern advances in finance. From the Roman Empire to the recent Dodd-Frank financial reforms, usury ceilings still occupy a central place in notions of free markets and economic justice.

《股市投资致富之道:投资大师费雪教你怎样炒股》是老费雪经典名著《怎样选择成长股》的姊妹篇，对于《怎样选择成长股》所提出的很多重要投资理念，《股市投资致富之道:投资大师费雪教你怎样炒股》在深度和广度上均有所突破，可以说是其投资的实践篇或投资的实践指南。该书试图解决两个问题。首先，投资者应如何确定一家公司是否具有卓尔不凡的管理层，它能否通过有效的管理为投资者创造一种能实现市值长期高速增长的投资工具；其次，对于这家非同寻常的公司，投资者应怎样掌握股票的最佳购进和抛售时机。费雪在书中不仅总结了如何通过股票投资获取丰厚利润的方法，而且为我们揭示了一种以最小风险创造最大收益的投资策略。费雪还为投资分析提供了一种标准化工具，向更多依赖专业投资建议的投资者展示了如何着手选择适合自身需要的投资顾问。书中生动且经典的案例比比皆是，作者的分析精辟透彻，既不乏专业性又不失趣味性，使人读起来心旷神怡，拍案叫绝。费雪对通货膨胀的分析极具前瞻性和预见性，就连弗里德曼也为书中令人难以置信的精辟分析所动容。即使在今天，这些观点和建议也依然不乏生命力，必定会让你叹服。费雪绝对无愧于“教父级的投资大师”这一称号。
Paths to Wealth through Common Stocks contains one original concept after another, each designed to greatly improve the results of those who self-manage their investments -- while helping those who rely on professional investment advice select the right advisor for their needs.

Originally written by investment legend Philip A. Fisher in 1960, this timeless classic is now reintroduced by his well-known and respected son, successful money manager Ken Fisher, in a new Foreword.

Filled with in-depth insights and expert advice, Paths to Wealth through Common Stocks expands upon the innovative ideas found in Fisher's highly regarded Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits -- summarizing how worthwhile profits have been and will continue to be made through common stock ownership, and revealing why his method can increase profits while reducing risk. Many of the ideas found here may depart from conventional investment wisdom, but the impressive results produced by these concepts -- which are still relevant in today's market environment -- will quickly remind you why Philip Fisher is considered one of the greatest investment minds of our time.

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?