top of page

Books

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win. By Chris Kuenne and John Danner (Harvard Business Review Lead Title, June, 2017).

Building a business from the ground up is enormously challenging, whether it’s a stand-alone startup or new corporate venture. Wall Street Journal and Amazon Bestseller Built for Growth shows the power of Builder Personality in shaping success, based on quantitative research and exclusive interviews with winning entrepreneurs.

Book cover for Built For Growth by John Danner

"Product-market fit is central to the Lean Startup movement. In this essential book, Kuenne and Danner focus on the fit between the founder’s personality and the teams, customers, and investors needed to build for growth. A must-read!"


—Steve Blank, Inspiration for the Lean Startup movement; coauthor, The Startup Owner’s Manual


"In order to achieve long-term growth, large corporations must foster the entrepreneurial spirit. Built for Growth provides a practical framework on how corporate leaders can foster, deploy, and support entrepreneurs inside their companies to unleash innovation and growth."


—Alex Gorsky, Chairman and CEO, Johnson & Johnson.  

THE OTHER “F” WORD: How Successful Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work. By John Danner and Mark Coopersmith (with John Wiley & Sons, March 2015)

“Great innovators don’t fear failure. They build on it. In this pragmatic guide, Danner and Coopersmith tell you how to think about failure in a positive way—and use it to create value.”

Walter Isaacson, President/CEO Aspen Institute, former Chairman/CEO CNN, bestselling biographer

Everyone wants success. Organizations want greater innovation, stronger growth, and deeper employee engagement. If you’re an executive, entrepreneur or team member, you know how hard that is to do.


“Whether you’re in the C suite or a leader on the front lines, I recommend that you make the bold move of putting failure to work. The Other “F” Word shows you how.” —Charlene Li, Founder/CEO Altimeter Group

The good news is you’re sitting on a largely untapped strategic resource that can help, but most organizations and managers prefer not to talk about it. It’s failure, the “Other F Word,” and it’s one asset you and your colleagues create and pay for every day. You might as well put it to work.  

Cover image for The Other F Word by John Danner

How? The authors’ practical 7-stage Failure Value Cycle helps you avoid failure in the first place, recognize it earlier, deal with it better when it happens (which it will), and leverage it to drive stronger performance. Danner and Coopersmith can help you unlock the potential of failure by respecting its inevitability, taking it out of the realm of taboo, talking about it openly, learning from it, and applying its lessons.  

The Failure Value Cycle Graphic by John Danner and Mark Coopersmith

“Executives today need the no-nonsense, practical insights The Other F Word delivers. And since failure knows no boundaries, this book promises to be a vital resource for intelligent leaders everywhere.” —Tammy Erickson, London Business School fellow, award-winning author

Failure’s like gravity—a pervasive, powerful fact of life. You may want to defy it, but you can’t deny it. And, like gravity itself, failure can be harnessed to achieve the success you want. Managed effectively, it can help you better serve the needs of your customers and investors, build stronger trust within your organization, and inspire greater creativity, commitment, and confidence across your organization. 

“Playing it safe gets you nowhere. That’s why the Lean Startup discipline embraces failure as a key resource for strategic insight. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an executive in a large company, this essential book shows you how to harness failure to get the results you want.” —Steve Blank, author of The Startup Owner’s Manual

Tap the power of The Other “F” Word to reap the rewards of a more failure-positive approach to your organization’s most important priorities. Put failure to work today!  

 

Order your copy here: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | 800CEORead | IndieBound

Take the quiz to discover your Builder Type today.

bottom of page