• Praise for “Billion-Dollar Lessons”

    Replete with thoroughly researched, well-known and not-so-well-known, entertaining but sometimes horrifying stories, Billion-Dollar Lessons should be mandatory reading for every senior manager and public company director. — Mel Bergstein, Chairman, Diamond Management and Technology Consultants

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    Overview of the Devil's Advocate Group (PDF) Seven Ways to Fail Big from Sept 2008 HBR Perfecting the Art of the Deal Beyond Fear and Greed Free Chapters from Billion-Dollar Lessons Audio Excerpts of Select Stories and Key Ideas from Billion-Dollar Lessons
    • Consulting Experience

    Here is a sampling of our recent consulting experience:

    Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid

    We were part of a group that provided an independent review of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic games. The review, commissioned by the Chicago City Council, was to advise the council on whether it could afford to grant a blanket guarantee that the city would cover any financial issues that arose if the games were awarded to Chicago. (While the games would have been privately financed, the International Olympic Committee required a blanket financial guarantee from the host city.) The final report is available at the Civic Federation website.

    Large ISP

    We advised a large Internet service provider in a potential 2008 acquisition of AOL’s dial-up business.  Working directly with the chief operating officer, we identified red flags about problems that might occur when it came to retaining AOL customers, extracting economies of scale and merging back-office systems. In the end, the potential acquirer decided to pass—and is delighted it did.  It picked off many AOL customers without having to buy the business and deal with messy integration issues.

    Fortune 100 financial services company

    We are advising a large financial services company on the redesign of its corporate strategy and innovation processes.  The core issue is that the company operates  in mature markets, where incremental improvement will not deliver the growth that investors demand. Yet the company has trouble fostering truly innovative efforts, partly because they seem to be too small to merit much attention from senior management in their early stages. We are helping the company understand how to foster its innovative ideas, from their inception all the way through to the point where they will be large businesses.