Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success [Hardcover]

Barry J. Moltz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 28, 2008

Conventional business wisdom tells you that there’s always something to learn from failure. Not true, says Barry Moltz. Sometimes, failure just stinks. Bounce! explains how success and failure are simply normal outcomes in the regular lifecycle of a business and that process over the long term matters far more than individual outcomes. This book shows you how to build a business that can “bounce” through these cycles for long-term success. If you run a business, better make it Bounce!

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Bounce! is about developing confidence, but not just any sort of confidence. It's about developing the kind of true business confidence that prepares you for both failure and success.

But this is not a book about coming back from failure.

Comeback books have been written many times before. The comeback is romanticized in society and totally overrated. In Bounce!, you'll learn about accepting failure as a normal part of the process even when there isn't something to learn from it. Failure that offers no real learning value jolts the business belief system.

In Bounce!, entrepreneur and business owner Barry Moltz explains that both success and failure are simply outcomes in the normal life cycle of business—a life cycle in which overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome. Great businesses are those that develop the resiliency to bounce through these cycles to succeed over the long term. Using a blend of personal experience and firsthand interviews with business leaders, Moltz shares the practical tools and techniques that every business needs to survive the cycle of ups and downs. In Bounce!, you'll learn the "building bands" for true business confidence, including:

• Using humility to "right size" your ego

• Making fear fly in formation

• Using choices to embrace failure when it happens

• The art of more effective risk-taking

• How process trumps outcome

• Setting patient goals to establish your own scorecard

• Creating your own brand of success

Bounce! lets you move forward from any event, situation, or outcome—good or bad—to the next place where a decision can be made based on the choices currently available to you. Bounce! allows us to be passionately excited and intensely enthusiastic about our business and our lives.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Bounce!

"Bounce ! will transform fears into confidence and define your own brand of success. Brilliant!"
—DR. JOE VITALE, author of The Attractor Factor

"Moltz shows us that when we recognize failure as simply part of any business experience and approach it with humility and endurance, we can all have the true confidence we need for future success."
—MICKEY KONSON, Vice President, Small Business Solutions, Capital One

"Bounce! is about how to build long-term business confidence through success and failure. Moltz captures the essence of resiliency by helping businesspeople learn from all of the business outcomes they experience over their career."
—ALAN A. BROWN, Executive Vice President, Nuveen Investments

"Thank you, Barry Moltz, for getting past the 'you can turn it around' cheerleading and the 'failure is your teacher' balms that are supposed to somehow ease our pain when we hit bottom in spite of our best efforts. Thank you for taking a hard, honest, and often humorous look at failure for what it really is, and most of all for providing some real practical advice for getting through it."
—SCOTT ALLEN, About.com, A New York Times Company

"Read this book—twice. Then give it away. Because you will forever know how to bounce with any challenge, crisis, or failure. In fact, this book really is about your next great success."
—MICHAEL PORT, author of Book Yourself Solid

"Can you Bounce? This is the book about the inevitable failures we all will experience and how we can best survive them. Moltz offers no false hope . . . just real tools for developing the resilience needed for sustained success."
—STEVEN S. LITTLE, author of the bestseller The 7 Irrefutable Rules of Small Business Growth

"Afraid of failure? Just Bounce!"
—DANIEL H. PINK, author of A Whole New Mind

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 11 edition (January 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470224088
• ISBN-13: 978-0470224083
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 0.9 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,071,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Barry Moltz gets small businesses unstuck. He has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years.

After successfully selling his last operating business, Barry has branched out into a number of entrepreneurship-related activities. He founded an angel investor group, an angel fund, and is a former advisory member of the board of the Angel Capital Education Foundation.

His first book, "You Need to Be A Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business" describes the ups and downs and emotional trials of running a business. It is in its fourth reprint and has been translated into Chinese, Russian, Korean and Thai. His second book, "Bounce! Failure, Resiliency and the Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success", shows what it takes to comeback and develop true business confidence. His third book is called, "BAM! Delivering Customer Service in a Self-Service World" which shows how social media and self service have changed customers service forever! His fourth book, "Small Town Rules", comes out in April 2012.

Barry is a nationally recognized expert on entrepreneurship who has given hundreds of presentations to audiences ranging from 20 to 20,000. He was appointed by the Illinois Governor in 2005 to serve as Chairman of the board of the Institute for Entrepreneurship Education (IIEE). As a member of the Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame, he also has taught entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He has appeared on many TV and radio programs such as The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, NPR and The Tavis Smiley Show.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read! January 30, 2008

By M. Harleman

Format:Hardcover

"Bounce" contains something many business books (and I've read hundreds) do not. Wisdom. As you read "Bounce", you will realize the author has, indeed, been 'in the trenches', and has a great deal of wisdom to share with you. On more that one occassion, you will have the 'ah-ha' moment of recognition where this crazy world of entrepreneurship comes together.
Don't think for a moment, however, that this is a dry, B-school tome. The author is funny and charming and the examples he uses are both entertaining and interesting. He will motivate, inspire, help you develop a plan of action, and give you the confidence to move forward.
"Bounce" will become a valuable resource, and even though the author titled the final chapter "Read This Book-Then Throw It Away", it will remain on your desk (as it is on mine) for future reference for a long, long, time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Barry Moltz has done it again. February 19, 2008

By T. O'Brien

Format:Hardcover

The perspective that Mr. Moltz presents is one that most Type "A"s can't comprehend; coping with failure. This book was an exceptional read for me since I am currently going through a career transition. While changing careers is not as frightening as starting a business, there are numerous parallels; from determining what success means to you to knowing if it is time to accept that your current career is not right.

I would recommend this book to anyone that has ever heard "It is alright to make mistakes as long as you learn from them" and have not believed a word. Mistakes happen and learning to bounce back from them is the real challenge.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good psychology book for enterpreneurs January 25, 2010

By ServantofGod

Format:Hardcover

This is a tailor made book for enterpreneurs. There are so many coverage on non personal aspects of failure including culture, cost of solvency, low correlation of outcomes of business startups from the same individual etc etc. Although I dont like his writing style and the eight bounces which he used to group his ideas, those teachings about fear and how to face it had compensated all its other shortcomings. Even if you are an enterpreneur and have read many books beforehand, you would still find it helpful. In short, recommended!

p.s. Below please find some of my favorite passages for your reference.

No one actually remembers our failures more than we do. But fighting with failure demons does give us an important skill that will ultimately boost our ability to bounce. Forget the outcomes. Forget about bouncing back to any particular place. Just bounce. pg38
Customers might say no, and the fear of rejection is too great for many of us. This is an extension of the fear that we may not live up to others' expectations. pg93
JD Wetherspoon's founder, Tim Martin, named these (640) pubs for one of his teacher in New Zealand who suggested that Tim would never amount to another. pg94
Even when a dancer is on one toe, she is moving. It's called the candy cane effect. Like a dancer, in business, you are never really in balance. pg94
Most things that we fear actually never happen. We spend more time being afraid of being afraid then actually experiencing true fear. pg96
Eliminating fear is unrealistic and unproductive....Using our fears and teaching "butterflies in our stomach" to fly in formation will produce the best outcome.....for that set of circumstances at that point in time. pg97
Fear may paralyse us so we do not recognise the choices, but they are always there if we pause to look at the decision-making process. We always have the choice to keep going what we are doing or to stop and do something else....Choice is an antidote to fear. It doesnt get rid of it, but it allows us to live with it. pg99
My attorney always told me when things were going badly for me, "Remember, the worst they can do is eat you, and that is illegal". pg100
"Osu," the Japanese term in Karate, means to strive with patience. pg209