Business Books

Illustration by Terry Allen for TIME

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

Nice timing. With Wall Street in tatters, this lesson in Business Failures 101 should have a built-in readership. The authors don't overintellectualize failure; they are strictly from the school of Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It. They make a persuasive case that it is only by studying the (costly) mistakes that other businesses have made that executives and investors can steer clear of disaster.

The authors' extensive research...