ANTICIPATE FAILURE

A fresh look at how businesses fail and succeed.

In this debut book, Ananth—the CEO of venture firm Next47 who’s worked for such major technology companies as Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard—explores the main reasons why business decisions don’t work out. He groups them into seven primary categories: failure to appeal to customers’ needs, technology issues, poor product quality, unsuccessful teams, bad timing, poor business models, and troubled execution. The book looks at a range of real-world examples, such as how cutting-edge gyroscopes and accelerometers weren’t enough to get the Segway transportation device past such hurdles as insufficient infrastructure and an unshakeable perception of nerdiness. Ananth contrasts consumers’ responses to the Apple Newton and PalmPilot, two personal digital devices with similar aims that took different approaches to the marketplace, and he explains how the maker of the Tata Nano automobile identified a substantial gap in India’s transportation options but failed to understand customers’ motivations and perceptions: “No one wanted to tell the world that they had bought a cheap car because that was all they could afford.” Scooter-sharing services illustrate the problem of basing a company on an unsustainable business model, and the music company EMI’s move into CT scanner manufacturing serves as an example of how the first company to develop a technology isn’t always the one that’s commercially successful. Each chapter presents companies that have avoided such obstacles, as well, and presents lessons along with coaching sessions designed to guide readers toward the best decisions.

Overall, this book is full of useful, actionable information while remaining a quick and easy read thanks to Ananth’s no-frills, conversational prose style and a wealth of intriguing subject matter. Readers will appreciate that the author generally stays away from business jargon (with the noteworthy exception of the repeated term go-to-market) and keeps the Silicon Valley name-dropping to a reasonable level, piquing readers’ interest without becoming grating. The book does a good job of treating business failures as learning opportunities rather than existential disasters or moral crises and also shows how leaders’ decisions went wrong without making personal judgments about the decision-makers. At the same time, Ananth makes it clear that successfully implementing his book’s lessons isn’t easy to accomplish, and he highlights several businesspeople who are celebrated for high-profile wins while showing how these same people lost in equally spectacular ways. The thematic organization of these stories is an effective device, as it makes the book’s overall logic clear and easy to follow. Ananth shows a talent for selecting anecdotes that are most likely to capture a reader’s interest while also effectively illustrating a key concept. Overall, he proves himself to be a fine storyteller, always placing the book’s narrative ahead of its didactic qualities. With its attractive presentation and solid information, the work is sure to appeal to avid readers of business literature, and it will particularly attract those in search of high-level and nontechnical analysis delivered concisely and coherently.

A well-organized and engagingly written book about learning from losses.