Bizstartup.ie - RESOURCES

Fail Better

One of your most important systems when running a business is the model you use to deal with your customers. This unusual book by Stephen Brown looks at how failure in setting up a way of doing things can ultimately lead to success

Taking its title from Beckett’s famous line, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’, this book celebrates great failures, who also went on to become great successes.

Did you know that Oprah Winfrey was sacked from her first job as a newsreader and told she wasn’t fit for TV? Or that KFC’s famous Colonel Saunders had failed in seven other careers before he set up the global fried chicken franchise at the age of 62? These are just two of the multitude of examples University of Ulster’s professor of marketing Stephen Brown uses to illustrate his belief that we can learn more from failure than from success, and that many great businesspeople come from a long line of failure. According to Brown, failure is not only educational, it is a vital experience.

Brown goes on to assert that the current customer-centric business model will not work, and uses examples such as Ryanair, which treats its customers ‘diabolically’ and yet they keep coming back for more, to demonstrate the validity of this theory. He also takes us through a series of immensely readable and very entertaining profiles of ‘The Best of the Worst’, from Rupert Murdoch to Steve Jobs to Coco Chanel, and in his witty way explains why those who pick themselves up and stubbornly persevere will do far better that those who follow the rules.

While this book is written specifically with marketing in mind, anyone who has ever failed at anything (ie, everyone) can take some comfort from it, and its basic teachings can apply to any area of business.