Not simply just another business guru book nor ‘how to succeed’ step-by-step start-up manual, Slaughter’s Failure is one of those rare volumes of wisdom to be read and studied several times. This is a great book for those unable (or simply unwilling) to read the now standard business guru bookshelf. Short, practical, and easily digested in a single sitting (tho’ I would recommend several), the reviewer would like to see the inclusion of a reference or bibliography section for those wishing to source or follow-up on the example cases of ‘successful failures’ listed in the various chapters, and exemplifying the various individual and corporate state-trait situations discussed.

Readily accessible to most readers interested to avoid the pitfalls of failed personal, business, and professional operations (at least before reading this book !), its nine short chapters will both inform and advise those who are embarking (or considering embarking) upon entrepreneurial activities at the early stages of business development. Indeed, for those yet to start their own businesses (and especially the more fearful procrastinators yet to have taken their first steps towards independent business start-up), Slaughter’s advice as contained in this book is both enlightening and motivating in a way not typically seen in a book on this subject.

Each chapter presents the reader with what at first glance may appear to be contradictory, even inimical approaches to business success (that is the author’s delivered wisdom, albeit koanic in nature), and succeeds thus to both alert and engage its reader each time. By no means abstract (on the contrary continually accessible in style), together with the use of familiar-sounding if carefully chosen example cases of failure (citing both individual and corporate successes over many years), Slaughter brings life to his proposed business-thinking strategies and advice with true real-life successes for the reader to contemplate – possibly emulate – when planning their own future business performance designs and operational reflections once in action.

In the same way that many an anomalous physiological or behavioural traits might occur as the result of one’s possessing the ‘gene for X’ (where ‘X’ is the trait of interest), it is logically as likely that the same trait might arise following the ‘absence of gene Y’ (or some combination of genes Y, Z or K, let alone their expression as functional proteins for later biological reaction). In the same way, and without giving away the book’s critical content, it is equally logical that anomalous business practices (i.e., success – consider that most restaurant businesses close within two yrs of their start-up dates), may well derive their success from what their owners/operators DO NOT try to do, rather than from what they are doing, from time to time. By this, I do not mean to imply that Slaughter’s approach simply rejects standard practices as taught in the typical MBA course, but by encouraging the budding/serial entrepreneur to ‘ignore warnings and wisdom’ (e.g., Ch.3), he is being both mentor and sage to his adherents.

© 2014 Anthony R. Dickinson

Dr. Anthony R. Dickinson [Indpt Corporate Consultant, and President, Hong Kong Society of Counseling and Psychology]