100 GREAT BUSINESSES AND THE MINDS BEHIND THEM |
Friday, 10 February 2006 |
The typical business success story starts like this: Mr X has a
brilliant idea in the bath one morning. He calls a friend, and together
they build the invention in the garage. Then they go out and sell it
from the back of Mr X’s car, and before they know it, they are both
millionaires. We like these stories because they make us think we could
easily do the same thing. All we need is that great idea, right?
Miracles do happen. Nike’s Phil Knight did start out selling running
shoes from the back of his car. Pierre Omidyar did just happen to have
an idea for an Internet site—eBay—that made him a billionaire several
times over. James Dyson became one of Britain’s richest men after
inventing a new kind of vacuum cleaner in his shed.
But these
fairy tales tend to skip over the details, the parts of the story
where, for example, Dyson had to build 5,127 vacuum cleaner prototypes
before he actually got the thing to work properly, where FedEx founder
Fred Smith nearly went broke several times over in the early years, and
why Debbi Fields of Mrs. Fields Cookies fame now has little to do
with the company that bears her name. Having a great idea is the easy
part. As the one hundred businesses in this book all demonstrate, the
real talent lies in knowing what to do next: how to finance and build
the product, when and how to market it, and—most importantly—how to
persist with it and continue to believe in it through the inevitable
difficult times. Like Lonnie Johnson, the rocket scientist who had to
spend eight years knocking on doors before somebody agreed to build his
invention, the Super Soaker water gun. The book covers a range of
companies, from recent startups to firms over one hundred years old,
from the origins of Corn Flakes to the birth of satellite radio; the
genius of MTV to the Red Bull energy drink phenomenon; from the Walkman
to the Nike sneaker. What they all have in common is a talent for
innovation, which can take many forms: inventing a whole new
product, taking somebody else’s idea and making it work better, or
simply taking over the market by selling products cheaper than anybody
else—take a bow, Samuel Walton.
There’s the story of the home
recipe for Liquid Paper that turned into a global company, why one of
the world’s richest men (with a $40 billion fortune) still drives a
non-descript
Volvo, and how the fortuitous purchase of a nude picture
of Marilyn Monroe kick-started the biggest-selling men’s magazine in
the world. This book is about the brains behind the Barbie doll, about
the woman who started Weight Watchers because, she recalled, “even her
poodle was fat,” those clever girls that created the Juicy Couture
tracksuit, and the man that reinvented the circus and became a
billionaire in the process.
There are the businesses you might
have seen down at the mall, such as Build-A-Bear Workshop and Dippin’
Dots ice cream, and wondered, where did they get the idea for that?
We
came across companies that created their own communities, such as
Pierre Omidyar’s eBay, which now has a population larger than
Britain’s, and Craigslist, which grew from an email bulletin to a few
friends into the world’s biggest free listing service. If nothing else,
reading through the one hundred profiles here demonstrates that there
is no single path to becoming an entrepreneur and no single type of
successful business. Nor is there a “correct” way to make a business
work. Each entrepreneur has their own set of circumstances, their own
personality, quirks, and survival skills. They develop their own
leadership style to suit their circumstances to learn to succeed. When
opportunity knocks, they listen. The simple truth is that there are as
many ways to succeed in business as there are great businesses. Here's 100 of them by Emily Ross & Angus Holland buy from Amazon
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