Failure Disrupted
Clear Milestones for Entrepreneur and Business Leader Success
Failure Disrupted is an upbeat entrepreneur’s guide to realizing one’s vision and creating a sustainable business.
Johnnie Garmon’s encouraging business book Failure Disrupted is about confronting stumbling blocks with aplomb.
Recasting failures as stepping stones on the way to success, this book is a paean to perseverance, focus, and resolve. Geared toward entrepreneurs, it suggests a formula for pursuing one’s vision, creating a company culture, and building lasting success. In doing this work, it takes aim at status quo paradigms, evangelizing for disruption and results. It casts frustration as a necessary part of growth cycles.
A personal story sets the book’s tone: Garmon notes that he was once fired from a hospice-care firm, leading him to the epiphany that he could no longer put his future in the hands of someone else. That “failure” became his starting point, enabling him to adjust his approach to success. He used it to cultivate resilience and navigate subsequent challenges, adjusting his mindset as he went. Based on his experiences with running, investing in, and coaching startups, the book progresses from foundational visions to tips for expanding one’s dreams to a team and leading with wisdom.
Some clichés are included in the book’s guidance, as with its language about setting foundations, trusting the jump, and change happening in an instant. Some cheesiness is involved too: Businesspeople are encouraged to shed their shackles, to “reach out and grab that $20 bill,” and to reframe “HR” as being about human relationships. Further, some of the ground the book covers is quite familiar, and it is short on supporting evidence for claims like “Your profits will equal your passion.” Some points are belabored as well, as with an argument about the importance of hiring workers who align with a company’s values to ensure cohesion. And the book’s questions, bullet-point lists, and worksheets distract from its more substantive reflections.
The book sometimes uses fresh language to enliven worn ideas, though. It is also illumined by novel concepts, as of how time is often a wasted resource but can be seen as an opportunity to strive for continuous improvement. The book’s advice is diluted somewhat by its memoir elements, though. For example, its coverage of Garmon founding the healthcare startup Providence Care is vast, with information about how he stretched out his seed money while waiting for Medicare funding to come through. Still, some insights are proffered from such stories that are applicable within a variety of business settings.
About rising “above the storms and doldrums” to build a significant and lasting company, the motivational entrepreneur’s guide Failure Disrupted models alternative mindsets for tenacious leaders.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
