Product Description

At age nine, Cameron Johnson started an Internet company.

Pete Amico quit his job on his first day because he didn’t feel like taking orders from his boss.

Greg Herro built a successful business selling diamonds made from the carbon extracted from ashes.

If any of these people remind you of yourself, you just might have the kind of personality to take the small business world by storm.

In If at First You Don't Succeed..., Brent Bowers, the small-business editor for the New York Times reveals the eight patterns that highly successful entrepreneurs share – and what we can learn from them.

Brent Bowers, in covering small business for decades at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, has chronicled the rise and fall of hundreds of start-ups. In If at First You Don’t Suceed…, he analyzes the common characteristics shared by dozens of successful small-business owners and their companies. Drawing on extensive interviews and research, as well as on the experiences and expertise of business consultants, venture capitalists, academics, and the entrepreneurs themselves, he describes the key traits that successful entrepreneurs have in common.

Among them:

• The ability to spot and seize opportunities
• An overwhelming urge to be in charge coupled with a gift for leadership
• The flexibility to come up with creative, out-of the-box solutions to problems or obstacles
• Incredible energy and tenacity in the pursuit of their goals
• Unwavering faith in their business
• The ability to take smart risks
• The ability to bounce back from setbacks and see failure as just one step on the path to ultimate success

For anyone thinking about starting a business, or attempting a start-up a second or third time, this book offers invaluable lessons and insights.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1223949 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-18
• Released on: 2006-04-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bowers, a business editor at the New York Times, tries to get past the generalities about what makes a successful entrepreneur—they "notice things," they "want to be in charge"—by bulking up on real-life illustrations of the broader principles. He gracefully delineates key entrepreneurial traits: an aptitude for seizing opportunity; rejection of authority; a long history of innovation; doggedness; agility, or a "tolerance for ambiguity" in the marketplace; enthusiasm tempered by pragmatism; and an ability to "fail upward," or learn from mistakes. The individual stories can be entertaining and enlightening—especially in later chapters on impulsiveness and coping with failure that contain vivid examples of what not to do. But Bowers's sample of small business owners begins to feel somewhat constricted when he repeatedly revisits the same people (like Cameron Johnson, who started his first dot-com company when he was nine years old), and his theories on the psychological roots of the entrepreneurial personality (e.g., hard-to-please fathers, or "borderline bipolar" disorder) make for the book's least useful content. Still, this is a well-organized, nimbly reported account for those seeking answers to the riddle of entrepreneurship. (Apr. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Bowers, newspaper editor and former reporter, presents a thought-provoking review of the traits necessary to succeed as an entrepreneur. He organizes his chapters around personal qualities that he considers essential, and these include spotting opportunities that no one else has seen and seizing them; rejection of authority and the need to run one's own show; characteristics such as curiosity, enthusiasm, and self-confidence since there isn't an entrepreneurial gene; nimbleness in the sense of tolerance for ambiguity; tenacity or refusal to give up; unshakable conviction in the potential for one's product; constantly testing the concept by asking, "Will it work?"; and the ability to fail upward, instinctive ability to determine what went wrong, and learn from mistakes. This is an excellent, easily read primer for aspiring entrepreneurs that will help them judge their prospects for success. It also is a valuable tool for current entrepreneurs for use in evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and gaining insight from the experience of others. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
BRENT BOWERS has been a business editor for The New York Times for the past ten years. He was formerly a reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Brewster, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Good read
A friend told me this was the antidote to boring business books and he has a point.

The book has some pluses: Good warnings about vulture capitalists and the value of the "double P's" passion and pragmatism. I liked his analysis of what makes succesful entrepreneurs tick and examples of how tenacious people turned ideas into fortunes. My favorite was the guy who makes diamonds out of cremated remains as keepsakes for the bereaved. Where did the author find these people?

America should stop whining about the decline of big business jobs and get off its collective butt like these entrepreneurs who showed spunk and made millions.

Inspiring Fun Reading!
Since I was lucky enough to be briefly profiled in one of Brent Bowers' NY Times' business columns, I was curious to read an entire book by this former Wall Street Journal reporter. I found his approach to a how-to business book both original and fun to read.

Each chapter is organized around an essential trait key to the successful entrepreneur such as - seizing opportunities, running your own show, tenacity, willingness to take calculated risks and an ability to tolerate uncertainty until the final pay-off.

Colorful characters inhabit this book and serve as catalysts to our own grand ideas. We find ourselves thinking, Gee, if that particular individual could be so courageous about the validity of his ideas, I can too.

It's also a comfort to know that most of these successes evolved from learning from failure.