100 Great Businesses and the Minds Behind Them: Use Their Secrets to Boost Your Business and Investment Success

This is a book that every entrepreneur should just keep by his or her bedside! Packed with uplifting and insightful stories that help put a face behind some of the major brands of our day, 100 Great Businesses opens a door to part of the business world that is rarely seen by outsiders: the initial ideas, the perseverance, the struggle, the doubt. I've kept this book by my bedside for the last year, and it has provided a ton of inspiration and plenty conversation! The individual company histories written within have a short-story feel to them, making them enjoyable to read and not overbearing with excessive information. And now that I've finished the book, I've already started from the beginning again! I hands-down recommend this book over others (eg. Founders at Work, which is just hard-to-read interviews). Read it at night before bed, in-between bouts of work to relax and re-inspire, or when you wake up in the morning to energize yourself for an awesome day!

Emily Ross and Angus Holland provide mini-profiles of 100 quite different companies, some of which were later sold before they became dominant in their respective industries, others that continue to thrive under the leadership of their founders or second-generation successors. What these remarkable companies share in common (other than their great success) is that each is based on an insight with regard to how to solve a problem. Here's an example of such an insight that resulted, not in one great company but in a product that transformed an entire industry. George de Mestral was irritated by the fact that burrs stuck to his clothes and to his dog's fur on their walks in the Alps. He examined the burrs and saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in a simple fashion. He devised a hook-and-loop fastener in 1945 and later patented the device, naming it "Velcro" after the French words velours and crochet meaning "velvet hook." With all due respect to such insights, however, Ross and Holland repeatedly remind the reader that coming up with a "great idea" is only the first stage of what is almost always a very long and especially difficult journey. Few who embark on that journey eventually complete it. In this context, I am reminded of Thomas Edison's observation "Vision without execution is hallucination." Also of Darrell Royal's suggestion that "potential" means "you ain't done it yet." Here are six mini-commentaries, each of which includes a brief excerpt or two from the narrative. Baby Einstein: Dissatisfied with videos, books, and other baby products then on the market (in 1997), Julie Aigner-Clark began making a homemade video for her infant daughter Aspen. The result was the "Baby Einstein Language Nursery" and it attracted so much attention so quickly that in the first year, sales were about $100,000 and she added other videos (e.g. Baby Bach, Baby Mozart, Baby Van Gogh, and Baby Shakespeare). By the time she and her husband Bill sold the company to Disney, sales exceeded $20-million. The Disney resources (especially marketing, promotion, and distribution) drove sales to more than $165-million in 2003. There are now 70 Baby Einstein products available. "That's always where we hoped the brand would go but didn't have the ability to take it." Aigner-Clark continued as a consultant to Disney insists that she is happy with the sale. Calloway Golf: The Big Bertha driver is probably its most famous product, certainly the one that accelerated its most rapid and most profitable period of growth. Working with his chief club designer, Dick Helmstretter, Ely Calloway developed a BB-3 prototype and tested it on a driving range and as he recalls, "neither of us could do anything but hit it great. We just sort of looked at each other and said, `''Wow, we'll never be able to make enough.'" Calloway renamed it "Big Bertha" after a large howitzer used by the German Army during World War One. Pro golfers as well as hackers soon found that t

I thought this book was interesting. Some companies I'd never heard of and some I knew well. I don't think it was meant as a complete education on starting a business but what I do think it was meant for AND what it accomplished was no two businesses (or people) are created the same way. It's for people who need to know that just because Phil Knight started selling sneakers out of his car is not the only way to start a business. It was also interesting to read about some people who were tricked or gave up control of their companies. That even the most successful companies out there had "drama". I know as a business owner when or if it's time for me to sell or take on investors I will be more aware of what control I sell or give up.

Never the original purpose of the authors, this book enables you to have dialogs with anyone you meet in any business gathering. It's 100 books on successful brands combined. I like it because typical books on single brands' success "stories" are mostly written by the non-founders. They all end up sitting somewhere on your bookshelf, unfinished, because of the unnecessary (and mostly dull) details plus the authors' second-guesses of the founders' original intents. On the contrary, this book is written in a reporter's perspective, with no "MSG" added. Covering all the big brands and a few you don't (or I don't) know. Though each brand has only 3 to 4 pages of coverage, it has all you want to know plus some uncommon interesting details even for common brands. Perfect preachers for "Less is more". Indeed, who on earth today is interested in 800-page details of one single brand while 777 of them are only author's views of the founder's?

In all my years of scouring the bookshops and newsagencies for books to assist my dream to think up the ideal business I have never seen a better book. I loved reading about totally different products and think that they all came from the minds of very ordinary people.