Barbara's Birthday

By James Stevenson

How can errors produce perfection? How can failure fuel ambition? How can confusion enhance creativity? The answer: little bets. The little bets approach is about using negativity to positive effect. If your plans fall apart, refine them; if you don't know where best to begin, just begin somewhere. Every decision is a risk: take a chance and see what happens. In Little Bets, leading business consultant Peter Sims turns problems on their heads and outlines a counter-intuitive path to perfection. Using real-life case studies from the worlds of business, design, warfare and even comedy, he shows that it can be more rational to act first and think later, more efficient to fail and find out what doesn't work. It's a flexible philosophy that has both saved corporate giants such as Apple and Pixar and inspired the third-world microfinancing industry. When success is the only acceptable outcome, Little Bets advocates a bold and radical approach in which failure is good, questions are solutions, and excellence is not a means but an end.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688014186
• ISBN13: 9780688014186
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Greenwillow Books
• Length: 34 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Barbara's Birthday

I found a copy of this at my office and fell in love with it instantly. Being another Barbara, I could sympathize with this disappointed mouse, who "never gets what she likes for her birthday." It's simply a lovely book with beautiful pictures and a sweet story that has Barbara and her friend imagining the best birthday party ever.