Chunka Mui is a co-founder and managing director of the Devil’s Advocate Group. He is the co-author of two important books on business strategy. He lectures widely, and he has spent more than two decades as a consultant on strategy and innovation.
Chunka’s more recent book is Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years. Among the critical praise for the book was a Wall Street Journal review that called it “fascinating,” “insightful” and “crisply written.” The Globe and Mail named Billion-Dollar Lessons the #1 business book of 2008. Inc. Magazine called it one of the best books for business owners. CIO Insight named it one of the top 10 business technology books of 2008.
The book attempts to revolutionize the practice of corporate innovation. Grounded by research into 750 major business failures, the book makes the case for legitimizing constructive dissent and fostering learning from the failure of others. A companion article, “Seven Ways to Fail Big,” appears in the September 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review.
Chunka’s earlier book, published in the late 1990s, was the huge best-seller Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance, which made “killer app” part of the business vocabulary.
Chunka’s perspectives are shaped by decades of experience working with premier companies as a consultant with leading consultancies. Chunka began his consulting career with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) . He was an early member of that firm’s Artificial Intelligence Group and a founding member of its Center for Strategic Technology Research. He moved to the Index Group in time to see the good, the bad, and the ugly of the business reengineering craze that Index launched. While at Index, he co-founded and directed the Vanguard research program (now TTI/Vanguard), where he led 100 member companies in U.S. and Europe in exploring the strategic implications of emerging digital technologies. Chunka then moved to Diamond Management & Technology Consultants Inc. At Diamond, he was chief innovation officer and a member of the firm’s worldwide operating committee. As a leader of Diamond’s strategy practice, he worked with numerous companies across many industries on their business strategies.
Based on his two books and extensive experience, Chunka has delivered lectures throughout the U.S. on the breakthrough possibilities at the intersection of business and technology and on the challenges in harnessing such opportunities. He challenges executives to think hard about strategic opportunities in their markets while at the same time offering them well-grounded, sensible advice on how to maximize their chances of success. Here is a excerpt of a recent presentation:
Chunka is also a fellow at Diamond and on the board of directors of Viewpoints Research Institute. Viewpoints, under the direction of computer pioneer Alan Kay, is in the midst of a five-year effort funded by the National Science Foundation to create “Moore’s Law Software.” The effort is a high-risk, high-reward attempt to create a large-scope-and-range software system in 3-4 orders of magnitude less code than current practice.
Chunka was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the US at a tender age. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from M.I.T. More background is available at Chunka’s personal site and his LinkedIn page.
