Paul B. Carroll

Paul Carroll has excelled at the highest levels of journalism for decades, while pushing the state of the art on business strategy and innovation.

For 17 years, he was a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal, where he wrote about information technology. The WSJ nominated him twice for the Pulitzer Prize, and he was a finalist once. He left to become a partner at Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, where he founded and edited a magazine that was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. For the past eight years, Paul has been the editor-in-chief at Insurance Thought Leadership, a digital platform that drives innovation in insurance.

He is the best-selling author of numerous books, beginning with Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, published by Crown in 1993. In 2008, Paul and Chunka Mui published Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, based on 20 researchers’ two years of analysis of 2,500 corporate disasters. While Jim Collins looked at success stories and said, Here’s how to be like those guys, Billion Dollar Lessons looked at failures and said, Here’s how not to be like those guys. The Wall Street Journal review called the book “fascinating…, insightful and crisply written.”

Paul was the writer on the National Broadband Plan, which the FCC submitted to Congress in 2010, and on a report at the Department of Energy later that year on its $36.5 billion innovation initiative as part of the Stimulus Act.

He and Chunka have founded a boutique consulting firm, the Future Histories Group, which stress tests corporate strategies. They have worked with senior management at numerous major organizations.

Paul graduated magna cum laude from Michigan State University’s Honors College (at age 19) and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University the following year.