Baby's First Merger (and Other Tales of Business Start-Ups)

Check out the table of contents. If you own shares of any of the 32 companies mentioned in it, make sure you read about their beginnings. You'll get a better sense of how they'll face tomorrow, and by reading about their seat-of-the-pants days, you'll also get a much better sense of companies as human organisms, filled with excitement, overconfidence and dread.

Tim Brady, Jerry Yang's college roommate and Yahoo!'s (YHOO Quote) first employee, talks about the several hundred times in the mid-1990s, during the company's infancy, when everyone thought they were sunk. Even good times brought on worries. In a famous memo about the high prospects of the Internet, Bill Gates wrote that Yahoo! was his favorite site and was "cool, cool, cool." Brady said that, in two seconds, they went from being elated to being convinced that Gates had them in the crosshairs.

Who knows if Yahoo! can surmount its current troubles, but read this and you'll at least be reminded that when it comes to facing challenges to its existence, the company has been there, done that.

I'll be mailing out a Hindrance label to Driving Change: The UPS Approach to Business (Hyperion) by Mike Brewster and Fred Dalzell. The acknowledgments page is key to the book's undoing.

Read it for yourself, but first let me hand you a tissue: