The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made: ...and 21 of the Worst
Crainer's objective is to present a cornucopia of management decisions drawn from history to honor as well as to learn from them. He selects these decisions on the basis of the results achieved--they made things happen. In addition, he offers his "Hall of Infamy," 21 major decisions that failed. His 75 great decisions include Henry Ford's decision to start his own company; Sears Roebuck's decision to go into retail sales; Bill Gates' decision to license MS-DOS to IBM; Napoleon's decision to promote people on the basis of merit; and the ancient Chinese decision to institute a system of currency. The author's list of the worst decisions includes the sale for $1 of bottling rights for Coca-Cola; Xerox's rejection of the first PC and virtually handing it to Apple Computer; Sony's development of Betamax (a much better product than VHS), but failure to license it; and IBM's inability to see that PCs were indistinguishable and there was no need for consumers to pay for the IBM brand.Mary Whaley