Title: Fail Better: Stumbling To Success In Sales & MarketingAuthor: Stephen Brown
Publisher: Cyan Books
Pages: 189
ISBN: 0-462-09904-0
Most business books (nearly all as a matter of fact) focus on how to achieve success. Different authors have different ideas on the best methods of achieving and sustaining long term success in a harsh and unforgiving market. Yet, it is also commonly acknowledged that failure is a better teacher in most respects than success; especially failure that is eventually leveraged into success. Most business books ignore the lessons to be learnt from failure. This book is one of the few that focuses on failure and the lessons that can be learnt from it. More specifically, it focuses on failure as a stepping stone to (eventual) success.
Stephen Brown's book Fail Better presents case studies of 25 individuals, past and present, who should have failed and in many cases failed spectacularly permanently. However, these individuals have confounded critics and have achieved success, in some cases multiple times. Most of these people were serial failures for most of their careers. In many cases, they undertook a large number of and varied types of jobs before settling (or stumbling) on their forte. Some of these names are familiar like for example Steve Jobs, P. T. Barnum while others were well known in their time but are now not so well known like Anna Held and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Nearly all these people have usually done the opposite of what business books recommend for success. They treat their customers with disdain, ignore things like market research and generally behave as if they know better than their customers what the latter really want. At the end, the author highlights what he considers to be common characteristics amongst all the people he highlights.
After reading the book, the conclusion I drew was that the one thing all these case studies had in common was that they satisfied some basic need better than others. Take the case of Michael O'Leary. Ryanair makes one promise: to get you from point A to point B in a fast, cheap, no-frills fashion. It then proceeds to fulfill this promise sufficiently repeatedly to make customers keep coming back. There is no concept of over-promising service and then causing disappointment. Similarly, Thomas Lipton made a promise: to provide quality basic foodstuff cheaply. He then kept on fulfilling his promise causing his customers to return repeatedly. This I believe is the basic take away from this book.
Final conclusion: an interesting book; worth a read but a bit unfulfilling. Whets the appetite but doesn't quite satisfy the hunger.
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