In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
CYAN YELLOW MAGENTA BLACK PANTONE 123 CV Chapman “A funny AND grim read that explains why so many of the high-tech sales departments I’ve trained and written about over the years frequently have Merrill R.Chapman homicidal impulses towards their marketing groups. A must read.” Foreword by Eric Sink —Mike Bosworth Author of Solution Selling, Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets and coauthor of Customer Centric Selling In Search of Stupidity In Search OVER 20 YEARS OF HIGH-TECH MARKETING DISASTERS 20 YEARS OF HIGH-TECH OVER n 1982 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Ikicked off the modern business book era with In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. Unfortunately, as time went by it became painfully obvious that many of the companies Peters and Waterman had profiled, particularly the high-tech ones, were something less than excellent. Firms such as Atari, DEC, IBM, Lanier, Wang, Xerox and others either crashed and burned or underwent painful and wrenching traumas you would have expected excellent companies to avoid. What went wrong? Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman believes he has the answer (and the proof is in these pages). He’s observed that high-tech companies periodically meltdown because they fail to learn from the lessons of the past and thus continue to make the same completely avoidable mistakes again and again and again. To help teach you this, In Search of Stupidity takes you on a fascinating journey from yesterday to today as it salvages some of high-tech’s most famous car wrecks. You will be there as MicroPro, once the industry’s largest desktop software company, destroys itself by committing a fundamental positioning mistake.
[Show full text]