Another Business School Trophy

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I read a book called "The Cola Wars - The Other Guy Blinked" written by the former Pepsi CEO.
As he ticked off the "strategic" decisions he'd made, they all seemed like no brainers to me.

I sometimes read business books. In other cases, I collect them as oddities, like buying the diet book of a celebrity who died from an eating disorder, which I could but did not do. (points to anyone who can name the book/author)

One book of interest is "Prophets in the Dark", by a business consultant and the CEO of Xerox in the 1980's. It is all about beating back Japanese competition in Xerox's core business.

Former Xerox CEO Kearns and business consultant Nadler here relate how Xerox marketed the exclusively patented plain-paper copying machine into a billion-dollar business in the 1960s, then became complacent and fell monumentally behind world competition by the early '80s. But under Kearns's leadership and a successfully executed program of product and service quality, Xerox became "the first major American company targeted by the Japanese to regain market share from them."

I don't know if there is anything in that book about giving up a dozen or more of the most influential patents related to personal computers and the Internet that would have been worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which Fumbling the Future addresses.

Of course, "Prophets" is selling for as little as $.01 and "Fumbling" is selling for about $18, so it looks like market forces really do work.

Actually, service and quality are important concepts, but considering the elephant in the room, I think that Kearns should have written the "Fumbling" book instead.