Question: Who is the intended audience?
Answer: The book speaks directly to business leaders who are facing the significant challenges brought on by the shifting landscape of failure in an increasingly transparent and global economy. Among some of the prime prospects are:

C-level Executives: At the highest levels of business, many chief executive officers, chief information officers, chief financial officers and company presidents are faced with opportunities for failure each day. Yet, there are few things more important to a company’s well-being than making confident choices – and creating rapid turnaround if an undesired outcome occurs. This book will give these tens of thousands of top corporate leaders an understanding of how they should be developing deeper levels of confidence for the good of their organizations, and to develop more rapid turnarounds from undesirable outcomes.

Entrepreneurs: In 2003, more than 500,000 new businesses opened their doors, and there are currently more than 23 million businesses in the United States, with a buying power of nearly $3 trillion. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, nearly 50 percent of those with employees will close their doors by Year Four. This book is an essential confidence handbook for entrepreneurs who routinely face opportunities for failure.

As U.S. business owners become more diverse – the number of black, Latino and Asian-American business owners more than doubled in the years between the 1997 and 2002 Census tabulations – understanding cultural differences is becoming more critical. The book takes a global look at failure and resiliency, providing a deeper and more inclusive understanding of cultural issues surrounding resiliency.

Business Educators: Overcoming failure is an essential topic in business.

Q: What is the book about?
A: Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true, says Barry Moltz. Sometimes it just stinks!

Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system. Both success and failure are simply outcomes in lifecycle of business where repetition is inevitable and overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome. Moltz demonstrates that developing the resiliency to “bounce” through these cycles determines who ultimately will succeed. Using real life business examples, he shows that with true business confidence, we can face our fears, let go of shame and failures, use all our choices, be better risk-takers, and define our own brand of success.

Q: Why are you the best person to write this book?
A: I have had spent 10 years in corporate America. I have had three businesses of my own. I sold my last business, but I also went out of business and was kicked out of my business.

I get sick and tired of people saying that failure is there is always something to learn from failure. We are continually reminded by those around us that failure is an important ingredient in the next success, possibly even a prerequisite. We tell ourselves that failure “happened to us” so that we could learn some important lesson that would later propel us to even more success.

Sometimes failure just sucks. There is absolutely nothing to learn.

When I lost my largest client because they were indicted by the SEC, what did I learn? That I wasn’t supposed to do business with criminals? I knew this. When my best employee left my company because her husband got a job in another state, what was I to learn? Not to hire people who are married?

Q: How is this book different from other books on this topic?
A: Bounce! is about developing confidence, but not just any sort of confidence. It’s about developing the kind of true business confidence that prepares you for both failure and success.

But this is not a book about coming back from failure. Comeback books have been written many times before. The comeback is romanticized in society and totally overrated. In Bounce!, you’ll learn about accepting failure as a normal part of the process even when there isn’t something to learn from it. Failure that offers no real learning value jolts the business belief system.

In Bounce!, entrepreneur and business owner Barry Moltz explains that both success and failure are simply outcomes in the normal life cycle of business-a life cycle in which overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome.

Great businesses are those that develop the resiliency to bounce through these cycles to succeed over the long term. Using a blend of personal experience and firsthand interviews with business leaders, Moltz shares the practical tools and techniques that every business needs to survive the cycle of ups and downs. In Bounce!, you’ll learn the “building bands” for true business confidence, including:

• Using humility to “right size” your ego
• Making fear fly in formation
• Using choices to embrace failure when it happens
• The art of more effective risk-taking
• How process trumps outcome
• Setting patient goals to establish your own scorecard
• Creating your own brand of success

Bounce! lets you move forward from any event, situation, or outcome-good or bad-to the next place where a decision can be made based on the choices currently available to you. Bounce! allows us to be passionately excited and intensely enthusiastic about our business and our lives.