How to Build and Lose a $9 Billion Corporation While Endangering People’s Lives in 30 Easy Steps

CBR12 BINGO: Money

1. Be a near-genius-level Stanford dropout with a revolutionary idea. (Say, performing dozens of different types of blood tests on a drop of blood on a machine that can fit into people’s homes.)
2. Impress the hell out of potential investors with your charisma, intelligence, and salesmanship.
3. Recruit your staff from the best tech firms Silicon Valley has to offer.
4. Give your company a snappy, tech-sounding name.
5. Pack your board with illustrious individuals, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and retired U.S. Marine Corps General and later Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Do not include anyone on your board who might be knowledgeable about the bio-technology around which your company is based.
6. Focus on the external design of the product. Make sure it looks sleek and elegant, something Apple would create. Don’t worry too much if the product doesn’t actually work; that can be fixed in Research and Development.
7. Dress like Steve Jobs. He wore black turtlenecks, so if you want to be successful, you should emulate him.
8. Surround yourself with sycophants. If anybody tries to point out problems with your product, they are obviously not team players, and you don’t need that kind of negativity. Fire them.
9. Be a textbook narcissist.
10. When speaking with investors, inflate the value of your company.
11. If you need to give a demo, don’t get rattled if the product isn’t working as intended. Just have someone from your office beam over fake results that makes it look like they are coming in real time. It’s not lying, because you’re going to fix it later. (If your Chief Financial Officer objects, see step #8 above.)
12. Hire a mean, bullying asshole who knows nothing about technology as your Chief Operating Officer and corporate enforcer.
13. Don’t allow separate teams within your company talk with each other. Knowledge is power, and you want to keep a tight rein on power.
14. Competition is good, so be sure to pit development teams against each other to get the best results.
15. Actively monitor your employees’ email accounts. You never know when there might be a traitor among them.
16. If you still can’t get your product to work, buy some commercially available versions and jury-rig them to perform what you need them to do while still maintaining the illusion that your machine is generating the results.
17. Be diligent about testing. However, if results fall outside the expected range, those can be considered “outliers” and tossed out.
18. Rule by intimidation and fear.
19. Exploit loopholes to get around FDA regulations.
20. Hide information from/lie to CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) inspectors.
21. Roll your faulty technology out into retail locations even though doctors are making decisions based on your blood tests and false results could have dire, even fatal, consequences for patients.
22. Double down and add more tests to your repertoire.
23. Have your social media team counter negative reviews of your lab’s results with fake positive ones.
24. If you suspect a former employee has spoken to a reporter, go after him/her with guns blazing. Bring in a team of the fiercest lawyers money can retain and intimidate the shit out former employees. Turn their families against them if you have to.
25. Try to leverage your investor connections to kill a story in a major newspaper.
26. Act surprised when allegations can no longer be denied. Say you’ll fix it.
27. Fire (and break up with) your second-in-command.
28. Don’t apologize.
29. Say goodbye to your money.
30. Get ready for the criminal trial.

Final note: Fantastic book, but it will make you angry. This company was so awful, Rupert Murdoch comes off as a person with integrity.