Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years.

• Position: Brief article - Book review

Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years. By Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui. Portfolio, 310 pages. $25.95.

Business books have been and will be written about the value of moving into "adjacent" markets, to minimize the risk companies face when buying outside their core competencies.

Adjacent strategies are not gimmes, however, as Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui note in this sweeping and nicely crafted book about business failures. Consider Xerox Corp., they write, and its failed push into financial services in the 1980s. A central argument: books like Good to Great chronicle only success stories, yet tales of failure are far more numerous and often more illuminating.

The authors have a terrific database to pull from: 750 of the biggest failures of the past 25 years. It's a witches' brew of mistakes that includes the AOL-Time Warner's failed attempt at synergy; Motorola Inc.'s $5 billion misadventure into satellite phone technology; and Eastman Kodak Co.'s insistence on staying the course in film despite clear signals that digital photography...