Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It: Unlocking the Nine Secrets of People Who Changed the World

The killer combination is extreme determination coupled with extreme flexibility regarding means and timing. If you are single-minded, yet patient, you will know the perfect time to act. Until then, keep your powder dry.

Self-belief is the foundation of success. This is an iron rule. Nobody ever became unreasonably successful without a strong belief in themselves. Self-belief can start with a vague but deep sense of being special.

An extremely close relationship with the client organisation, and particularly its head. • Equality of status between the client organisation and the consulting firm (Bain & Company), and between the client’s CEO and the lead partner from Bain handling the client. • A long-term and continuous relationship, completely at odds with the consulting

Successful people typically don’t plan their success. Instead they develop a unique philosophy or attitude that works for them. They stumble across strategies which are short-cuts to success, and latch onto them. Events hand them opportunities they could not have anticipated. Often their peers with equal or greater talent fail while they succeed. I

The first landmark is self-belief. If we don’t have strong self-belief, it’s almost impossible to become unreasonably successful.

commend it to you. Breakthrough achievements do not require genius; they can be the offspring of hard thinking by the likes of Henderson; and, I make bold to assert, by you and me. Lenin created Russian communism, the first time

Nobody can become unreasonably successful by doing what everyone – or anyone – else is doing. At some stage in their career, all our players left behind established paths and ploughed their own furrow.

Here are examples of pool vehicles the players used. For Bill Bain, it was the theories of business strategy that had been originated by the Boston Consulting Group. BCG put its ideas such as the Boston Box out into the public domain to build reputation and sell business. When Bill Bain started Bain & Company, he was able to use all BCG’s conce

The Jeff Bezos saga is the starkest example of the most frequent pattern of transforming experiences within business – an exciting and challenging job in a high-growth venture which leads the individual to acquire rare knowledge and think that they can change the future by starting their own company.