There is a very nice chapter in the somewhat dated but classic book Business Adventures [1] on trade-secrets and what happens when employees of one company move to another. In chapter 11, "A man, his knowledge, and his job", there is a story of a "space-suit" manufacturer Goodrich suing an employee for moving to its rival Latex for stealing trade-secrets. The story is timely in context of Meta hiring researchers from open-ai, deepmind etc for 100s of millions for the knowledge in their heads of the recipes which work for making superior LLMs - the knowledge of which is empirical and may take years to discover.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-St...

And how it came to be is a fascinating story too [0].

And there’s a fascinating bit about Xerox in John Brooks’ "Business Adventures" [1].

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danpontefract/2023/02/25/how-xe...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-St...

Love that story. It's told in more detail along with other stories like it in Business Adventures by John Brooks - https://amzn.to/3cq4Fs5

> Examining the lives of successful entrepreneurs teaches us very little. We would do far better to analyze the causes of failure, then act accordingly. Even better would be learning from both failures and successes.

Any recommendations (books, blogs etc.) on material that actually does this? The one business book that comes to mind is "Business Adventures" by John Brooks [1], which ironically might be as popular as it is because it's one of Bill Gates' favourite business books.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-St...

From about 1870 to the 1960s stock quotes were communicated using stock tickers that communicated over telegraph lines and printed thin strips of paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape

The system worked well until the 1960s when the volume of trading on busy days overwhelmed the system, sometimes delaying the quotes for hours. There had been plans to build a computer network already, but the data outages made it an urgent issue.

The classic book Business Adventures has a chapter on the chaos sowed by the failure of ticker tape.

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-St...

now available in Kindle Unlimited (http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Str...)

A link to the Amazon listing - http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Str...

Also available as an ebook: Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-Str... iBooks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/business-adventures/id89031... Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/business-adventures-john-bro... and Google, mentioned above.