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?

Praise for BILLIONS OF DROPS in MILLIONS OF BUCKETS"Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets provides a bracing and original look at philan-thropy that... offers a much-needed corrective to conventional wisdom. Steve Goldberg combines a resolve to understand why so much philanthropy accomplishes so little enduring social change with a timely and serious proposal to reinvigorate nonprofit capital markets through the simplest of insights: getting more of the money to where it can do the most good. This book will change how forward-looking philanthropists, foundations, and policymakers think about the relationship between charitable giving and the transformative capacity of social entrepreneurs."—Jerr Boschee, founder and Executive Director, The Institute for Social Entrepreneurs; Visiting Professor of the Practice in Social Enterprise, Carnegie Mellon University"Goldberg's arguments are logical next steps in the rapidly evolving discussion of social capital markets. He offers ambitious proposals informed by the reality of current practices and focused on an achievable set of goals. He fully recognizes the potential for restructuring that is inherent in this time of financial hardship. Real change relies on big ideas, and Steve Goldberg offers us several."—Lucy Bernholz, author of Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets: The Deliberate Evolution"When I first heard about 'evidence-based medicine,' I thought: 'you mean it isn't?' Read this book and that's how you'll feel about 'performance-based philanthropy.' Goldberg takes some of the best current management thinking and applies it to social enterprise, illuminating both the encouraging successes of social entrepreneurs and the barriers they face. Even better, he presents compelling ideas for making the social sector vastly more effective."—Christopher Meyer, Chief Executive, Monitor Networks"Goldberg calls for more 'performance-driven philanthropy,' where nonprofits are rewarded based on their results, in place of the current dysfunction. It is an important call and a valuable contribution to discussions about how to improve nonprofits in the U.S. and internationally."—Martin Brookes, Chief Executive, New Philanthropy Capital"Billions of Drops... is a must-read romp through emerging fields of social entrepre-neurship and nonprofit capital markets."—George Overholser, founder and Managing Director, NFF Capital Partners

Called well worth reading by The Economist and earnest and entertaining by the Financial Times, Tarun Khanna s Billions of Entrepreneurs is an elegantly... written book that mixes on-the-ground stories with thorough research to show how Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs are creating change through new business models and bringing hope to countless people across the globe. Khanna juxtaposes, on a variety of levels, China and India; explores how the future depends on understanding the yin and yang of these two nations; and emphasizes the increasingly important links between China, India, and the West. Khanna embraces what he calls a big tent view of entrepreneurship going beyond typical stories of high profile, young executives taking companies public and focusing on social and political entrepreneurs who are redefining the norms of daily activity.In the book, Khanna sets out to demystify many of the questions that confound foreigners (BusinessWeek), exploring subjects that include each nation s treatment of multinationals, Chinese and Indian managerial talent, and state vs. grassroots approaches to business and entrepreneurship. Khanna s insightful analysis draws on history, economics, and political science, and is humanized by vivid portraits of the lives of individual entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists whom the author has met during his regular visits to each country. He argues that hope for prosperity in both countries lies in the hands of the billions of entrepreneurs who are alleviating social problems and historic tensions, benefiting both countries and the world at large. According to the Financial Times: What Khanna does do, and does well, is cover vast sociopolitical and economic ground, and provide meaty information derived from conversations with people who have done business in India and China.

"Khanna has written an objective and insightful comparison of China and India. His analysis of Indian developments is particularly outstanding, because... it is based on his firsthand experiences in India. But he does not hold back in his praise of Chinese successes. The result is a very fair-minded report on the two Asian giants."-- Foreign Affairs"Khanna delivers a dense but lively blend of anecdotes and analysis. He shows how entrepreneurial spirit is transforming both these countries not only economically, but strengthening ties between the two." -- NewsweekMuch attention is being paid to business opportunity in China and India, the world's most populous nations. According to Tarun Khanna, it's the new entrepreneurial emergence of these two nations that will have the greatest impact on business, politics, and global society as a whole. Billions of Entrepreneurs is an elegantly written book that mixes on-the-ground stories with thorough research to show how Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs are creating change through new business models, and bringing hope to countless people across the globe.

Albert French lights up the monstrous face of American racism in this harrowing tale of ten-year-old Billy Lee Turner, who is convicted of and executed... for murdering a white girl in Banes County, Mississippi in 1937. Billy is about the deaths of two children, one girl, one boy, the girl's death an accident, the boy's a murder perpetrated by the state. Though the events Billy records occur during the 1930s in a small Mississippi town, the range of characters, emotions, and social forces, and the inexorable march to doom of a ten-year-old boy and the society that dooms him, catapult the story far beyond a specific time and location. Narrated by an anonymous observer in the rich accents of the region, constructed in a series of powerfully lean vignettes, Billy imparts an intensity that is nearly unbearable. It is a tour de force of dramatic compression. Albert French evokes with cinematic vividness the picking fields and town streets; the heat, the dust, the unrelenting sun, the poverty of 1930s Mississippi. High-spirited Billy; his mysterious and passionate mother, Cinder; his friend, Gumpy; and other characters black and white are realized with depth and authority. Told in classic, unrelieved terms yet with remarkable compassion and restraint, their story is an unsentimental and ultimately heart-rending vision of racial injustice. Billy is, quite simply, one of the most powerfully affecting novels to come along in years.

In 1930's New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the... boy into his world of racketeering. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz's girlfriend. Relive this story through the title character's driving narrative, a child's thoughts and feelings filtered through the sensibilities of an adult, and the result is E.L. Doctorow's most convincing and appealing portrayal of a young boy's life. Converging mythology and history, one of America's most admired authors has captured the romance of gangsters and criminal enterprise that continues to fascinate the American psyche today.

If Melville had never written "Moby Dick," his place in literature would have been assured by his short fiction. "Billy Budd, Sailor" is his last work... and his masterpiece -- a brilliant study of the tragic clash between social authority and individual freedom, human justice and abstract good. In "Bartleby the Scivener," a Wall Street law clerk takes passive resistance to a comic -- and tragic -- extreme. Completing the beautiful collection are: "Benito Cerino, " "The Encantatas, " "The Plaza, " and finally, Melville s chilling science fiction parable, "The Bell Tower."

Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement... of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title--offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.This edition of Billy Budd includes a Foreword, Biographical Note, and Afterword by James Gunn.Aboard the warship Bellipotent, the young orphan Billy Budd was called the handsome sailor. Billy was tall, athletic, nobel looking; he was friendly, innocent, helpful and ever-cheerful. He was a fierce fighter and a loyal friend. All the men and officers liked him...All but one: Master-at-Arms Claggart. Envious, petty Claggart plotted to make Billy's life miserable. But when a fear of mutinies swept through the fleet, Claggart realized he could do more than just torment the Handsome Sailor...He could frame Billy Budd for treason...

This is the final work of American author Herman Melville (1819-1891), discovered amongst his papers three decades after his death and published in... Raymond Weaver's 1924 edition of "The Collected Works of Melville." The emergence of what some consider to be Melville's masterpiece sparked a revived interest in the forgotten writer, despite the complex and incomplete nature of the manuscript. This is the first of many attempts to piece together and refine the sometimes illegible text, which included questionable additions and omissions made by Melville's wife after his death. The story stemmed from Melville's interest in an 1888 article called "The Mutiny on the Somers," concerning three sailors who in 1842 had been convicted of mutiny. Billy Budd is a navy sailor accused of mutiny by a fellow officer, and immediately strikes his accuser dead, followed quickly by a trial, conviction and execution. The novel presents several different versions of the events, organized by Weaver into twenty-six chapters including the omitted "Daniel Orme" chapter.

Melville's short stories are masterpieces. The best are to be appreciated on more than one level and those presented here are rich with symbolism and... spiritual depth. Set in 1797, Billy Budd, Foretopman exploits the tension of this period during the war between England and France to create a tale of satanic treachery, tragedy and great pathos that explores human relationships and the inherently ambiguous nature of man-made justice. Tales such as Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Lightning Rod Man, The Tartarus of Maids or I and My Chimney, show the timeless poetic power of Melville's writing as he consciously uses the disguise of allegory in various ways and to various ends.

Stung by the difficult reception of Moby Dick, Herman Melville became obsessed with the difficulties of communicating his vision to readers. His sense... of isolation lies at the heart of these later works. "Billy Budd, Sailor" is a classic confrontation between good and evil, and the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against a wrongful accusation. The other stories also illuminate the way fictions are created and shared by society.

Featured in this volume are "Billy Budd", Melville's posthumously published novella, the story of the rivalry between a handsome sailor and his demonic... captain; the tale of the apathetic "Bartleby, the Scrivener; " the riveting "Benito Cereno", the story of a slave ship mutiny written at the time of the Amistad case and "The Town-Ho's Story", a chapter from Melville's masterpiece, "Moby Dick". Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.

A master of the american short story Included in this rich collection are: The Piazza, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Lightning-Rod Man, The... Encantadas, The Bell-Tower, and The Town-Ho's Story.