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The Dumbest Moments in Business History: Useless Products, Ruinous Deals, Clueless Bosses, and Other Signs ofUnintelligent Life in the Workplace Business 2.0 magazine publishes an annual cover story called vThe 101 Dumbest Moments in Business." Featuring 101 hilarious items about the year's most unbelievably stupid business blunders, it's hugely popular with its more than half a million print subscribers and with the two million people who read it on the Web this year. In The Dumbest Moments in Business History, the editors of Business 2.0 have compiled the best of their first four annual issues plus great (or not so great, if you happen to be responsible) moments from the past. From New Coke to the Edsel, from Rosie magazine to Burger King's vHerb the Nerd,v the book's highlights include:
Grouped by theme - bosses gone bad, criminally creative accounting, etc.- The Dumbest Moments in Business History is a fun and funny look at the big-time ways that big-time companies have screwed up through the decades. From The Desk of Josh Quittner, Editor of Business 2.0 | |||||||||||||||||
Welcome to The Dumbest Moments in Business History. This volume is a collection of cautionary tales from which we all can learn valuable lessons about how not to conduct business. So I'm pretty certain you can expense it. I'm not sure why people love to read about stupidity in business, but they do. I know this because every year, our magazine, Business 2.0, features the "101 Dumbest Moments in Business," and readers go crazy for it. Perhaps it's the same impulse that makes bloopers such a whoop-de-do in the sports roundup on the nightly news. Or maybe it's more like rubbernecking. I try not to think about either too much. All I know is, it works. When we ran "101 Dumbest Moments" last year, TV crews came from as far away as the Netherlands to interview our writers. I guess they don't actually do enough business over there to generate their own dumb moments. On the pages that follow, you'll find examples of stupidity so monumental, they'll make your head spin like the hood ornament of an Edsel (before it flies into the windshield). I can't promise that this book will inoculate you from business idiocy. But if you like bloopers, you're in for one heck of a read. Organizational Conceit Explained The following tales of jaw-dropping imbecility are arranged in chapters corresponding to the divisions of a corporate organization to make it easy and fun to follow the trajectory of dim-bulb behavior through the hallways of the workaday world - and because otherwise the book would be just a grab-bag of business idiocy, a riot of terrible products, self-destructive advertising, untalented fraud artists, spectacularly misjudged mergers, swinging-dick interoffice braggadocio, money-flushing Hollywood movies, squandered fortunes, flubbed opportunities and bogus sex aids. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good snapshot of the witless underside of the world economy ever since the Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, like wine experts savoring the differences among grape-growing regions, we aficionados of dumb moments in business are able to classify and relish the distinctions between, say, boneheaded moves in accounting (seemingly dry and monochromatic, these screw-ups build in flavor over time, leaving a powerfully expensive aftertaste) and moronic manufacturing decisions (a woody presence with metallic undertones, accented with lots of fruity depositions). Of course, some idiotic incidents resist categorization because truly dumb moments in business often are an ensemble effort. Why else would people spend so much time in meetings? In these cases, using the combination of expertise and utter whim that we employ throughout the book, we award the dunce cap to whichever department we feel like picking on. Criteria for Inclusion First of all, nobody gets killed. When idiocy trips over into lethality - the exploding Ford Pinto comes to mind - only the truly twisted can get a giggle out of it. So consider yourself warned, sicko. Second, the stories must have a discernible moment of utter fatuity rather than a slowly festering brainlessness. You try to make something funny out of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Third, when some form of business buffoonery is particularly chronic, only the choicest example makes the cut. For instance, private-sector types who enter government and regard it as a colossal piggybank are all too familiar, so we picked our favorite: William Duer, the assistant secretary of the Treasury who looted a fortune from the tender young U.S. government after the Revolutionary War and managed to end up in debtor's prison nevertheless. With a guy like that, do you really need to hear about Spiro Agnew? Apologies to the Slighted No doubt the government of Bahrain will lodge a protest that they once had a crook who was much stupider and more colorful than Duer and therefore deserves the "dumbest" distinction. Yes, you will detect an emphasis toward homegrown American chowderheads and toward incidents from the United States in the past half-century. But it's not so much a case of provincialism as the simple fact that the most powerful economic engine the world has ever known inevitably produces an inordinate amount of industrial waste in the form of really dumb folks doing really dumb things. That said, we welcome your scathing criticism and urgent additions. After all, we're already collecting entries for the New! Updated! Dumbest Moments in Business History. What do you think we are - stupid?
Copyright © 2004 Adam Horowitz. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission. About the Author Adam Horowitz is the executive editor of Business 2.0 magazine and a creator of "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business." More by Adam Horowitz |
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