- 1921 – Baseball: The World Series is broadcast on the radio for the first time.
- 1962 – Dr. No, the first in the James Bond film series, is released.
- 1969 – The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus airs on BBC One.
- 1990 – After one hundred and fifty years The Herald broadsheet newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, is published for the last time as a separate newspaper.
If you enjoy James Bond and business, you’ll love the book The Bond Villain MBA Vol. 1.
If you succeed in destroying the world, who will be your customers?
In the James Bond movies, the villains are often successful entrepreneurs who have built their own world-beating corporations with dominant market positions. Yet instead of continuing their firms’ managed growth, they overreach with a plan that is always illegal and often involves global destruction.
The Bond Villain MBA finally takes these entrepreneurs to task, proving that their downfall is really nothing more than the consequence of bad business decisions.
Goldfinger; Blofeld; Hugo Drax of Moonraker; Max Zorin of A View To A Kill; Le Chiffre of Casino Royale: these really are, to borrow a current phrase, the most interesting men alive. Driven and creative, organizational geniuses to a man. Capable of raising money for projects that would appear ludicrous were they written out on a cocktail napkin, much less detailed in a business plan.
Opposing these great men of vision is the government agent James Bond. His tools amount to little more than rampant womanizing and martini-fueled mayhem — basically being the biggest douchebag in the bar. He’s going to steal your girl, blow up the building and will probably receive a medal for his troubles.
The Bond Villain MBA Vol. 1 examines this intersection of entrepreneurial ambition and government overreach, through the lens of prominent Bond films.
- Should Blofeld hire teenage models with severe allergy problems to distribute a lethal virus? (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service)
- Is staging an “Enter The Dragon”-themed martial arts tournament an effective way to combat state-sponsored espionage? (The Man With The Golden Gun)
- Should Le Chiffre try to make money in poker if getting a good hand causes his eyeball to bleed? (Casino Royale)
Finally, someone has applied rigorous business analysis to these titans of industry’s work. Hilarious and insightful, The Bond Villain MBA guarantees you will never look at plans for global destruction the same way again.