Many business books are about how to learn the secrets of wildly successful entrepreneurs. Those secrets don’t seem as timely when wildly unsuccessful Wall Street giants are dominating the news. A more relevant question might be: Why do large businesses sometimes fail so spectacularly, and what could have been done to solve their problems before the flameouts? That’s the question former Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Carroll sought to answer in his new book Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, co-authored with Chunka Mui, fellow at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants. We talked to Carroll about what businesses of all sizes should draw from billion-dollar failures. Excerpts:
