"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." [Via thecoolhunter.net]

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