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The
Dumbest Moments in Business History: Useless Products, Ruinous Deals,
Clueless Bosses, and Other Signs of Unintelligent Life in the Workplace
by Adam Horowitz Rating: • (Read Only
If Your Interest Is Strong) |
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title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Dim I
laughed a lot when I read the list of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
that appeared in Business 2.0. Based on the success of that listing, the
editors decided to proceed with a book titled, The
Dumbest Moments in Business. Unfortunately, the book isn’t nearly as
entertaining as the list. Turning some pages was downright dreary, so unless
you really want someone’s perspective on dumb moments in business, I
recommend you take a pass on this book. Here’s an excerpt from the end of Chapter 4, “Senior Management,” pp. 60-65: Why Mass
Transit Has Such a Hard Time Succeeding in This Country “[W]hat you
are doing, as managers, with this company makes me SICK. . . . I
know the parking lot is not a great measurement for ‘effort.’ I know that
‘results’ is what counts, not ‘effort.’ But I am through with the debate. .
. . Folks, this is a management problem, not an EMPLOYEE problem. Congratulations,
you are management. You have the responsibility for our EMPLOYEES. I will
hold you accountable. You have allowed this to get to this state. You have
two weeks. Tick, tock.” —Neal
Patterson, CEO of software company Cerner, in a
March 2001 e-mail to management staff. Patterson was concerned with the emptiness
of the company parking lot, while investors, after the e-mail was leaked,
became concerned about the stability of Cerner and
Patterson himself. The company’s stock sank 22 percent in the three days
after the e-mail leaked. In
a Time of Great Struggle. . . in a World That
Wouldn’t Listen . . . One Man . . . Will Stand Alone: Boss Kevin Costner in
Three (Mis)Steps. 1. Having
already scored big by turning Boomer boyhood fantasies into
multimillion-dollar projects (Get to be a baseball player in Bull 2. Costner realizes the problem with Earp: though he produced and starred, he
didn’t direct. The trouble is, he doesn’t come to
the realization until his movie the following year, an aquatic epic about the
search for dry land on an Earth flooded by melting ice caps, is nearly
finished. When Waterworld director
Kevin Reynolds quits (can’t imagine why), his star takes the helm. The final
budget of $175 million, a Hollywood record at the time, suggests that Costner
attempted to melt the North Pole itself. Despite featuring at least one
landmark moment in film history—the only time a former depictor
of Eliot Ness has ever been seen quaffing his own urine on-screen—Waterworld makes only $88 million in 3. Costner
realizes the problem with Waterworld: too
much water. His next epic (after a break to play some golf in Tin Cup) is
set in an arid, postapocalyptic wasteland where the
movie’s producer-director-star, playing an ersatz mailman, leads a band of
rebels offering a special delivery. . . of justice.
Audiences in 1997 guffaw at the trailer, which showcases Costner heroically
astride his trusty steed and wearing a U.S. Postal Service uniform—so much
for the action figure licensing bonanza— leading Warner Bros. to remove most
of the mail-carrying imagery on posters and trailers for a movie called The
Postman. Budgeted at $80 million and featuring inspiring dialogue such as
“It takes one postman to make someone else a postman,” the movie posted less
than $20 million in There’s a
Reason Why Waterworld Was Called
“Heaven’s United
Artists thought it was signing up a prestige picture when the studio greenlighted a historical heartland epic in 1978. Michael
Cimino, fresh off Best Director and Best Picture
Academy Awards for The Deer Hunter, was contracted to make a $7.5
million movie that would take a little more than two months to shoot and run
at about two and a half hours. Instead, the Heaven’s Gate production
costs more than quadrupled to $36 million—unthinkably lavish in those
days—as the filming dragged on through retake after retake for four months,
and Cimino just couldn’t bring himself to brutalize
his creation by cutting the movie to less than five and a half hours. Nervous
UA envoys who ventured to the set in Critics able to peer through on-screen
dust storms detected a terrible movie, and audiences in 1980 simply stayed
away from what the New York Times termed “an unqualified disaster.” Heaven’s’
box-office gate was hellish—the first weekend pulled in just $1.3
million. A year later, United Artists’ owner, Transamerica, sold off the
damaged studio. Cimino became the poster boy for
the dangers of indulging visionary directors, which is why today all
creative decision making in Even Better: The Fetus Is in an Airtight
Compartment, so There’s No Danger of Secondhand Smoke. Fire ‘Em Up, Ladies! “Some women would prefer having smaller babies.” —Joseph Cullman, then chairman of cigarette
manufacturer Philip Morris, after being presented in 1971 with studies
showing the correlation between pregnant smokers and low-birth-weight babies Oh, C’mon, That Joe Cuilman
Quote Was from Three Decades Ago. Cigarette Makers Have Become Much More
Socially Responsible Since Then. “At some point they will learn to crawl, and then
walk.” —RJR
Nabisco chairman Charles Harper at a shareholders meeting in April 1996,
explaining that infants who have a problem with secondhand smoke can just
move to another room And They Say
It’s Impossible to Foul Yourself. The American
Basketball Association of the 1970s seems like a long-lost era of
professional basketball utterly unconnected to today’s National Basketball
Association. Gone are the red-white-and-blue basketballs, hot-pants uniforms,
Afros the size of beanbag chairs and entire rosters of players who’d never
been handcuffed and shoved into the backseat of a patrol car. But vestiges of
the ABA do survive, in the form of four teams that joined the NBA—and the
spectacularly terrible deal their owners struck with the ABA’s St. Louis
Spirits in order to free themselves up to make the switch. When the In
perpetuity. Forever. It
was the smartest deal in sports history, which means somebody at the other
end deserves the title for dumbest. In the pre—Michael Jordan era, “TV
income” didn’t instantly translate as megamillions.
For the entire 1980s, in fact, the deal paid the Silnas
and Schupnak a relatively modest $8 million. But
then 10-figure TV dough started rolling into the league, and every year a
good chunk of it—about $13 million at last count—goes straight to the former
owners of a team that never dribbled a ball in the NBA. Pacers president
Donnie Walsh desperately tried for five years in the 1990s to buy out the
deal when it became apparent what sort of bonanza the ex-ABA teams would be
shelling out, but finally gave up in 1999. Over the past quarter century, the
Silnas and Schupnak have
been compensated for their nonexistent troubles an estimated $100 million
through the end of the 2001—02 TV contract. Despite his first-class
compartment on a long-rolling gravy train, Ozzie Silna
does keep busy. Sticking a needle in his reluctant benefactors, Ozzie runs an
embroidery company that sells caps emblazoned with the old Spirits logo and
the words “In Spirit—In Perpetuity.” If
you’re a fan of outtakes, those video bloopers shows, The
Dumbest Moments in Business should amuse you. For me, the fact that the
authors overlooked the entire S&L debacle made the effort more shallow than I expected. Had the rest of the book
been really funny, I would still recommend it. Unfortunately, the laughs just
aren’t worth it for most readers. Steve
Hopkins, April 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Dumbest Moments in Business History.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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