Overview

For my 2008 book The Breakthrough Company, I spent five years analyzing the performance of 7,000 growth companies. When I identified the top nine performers over a twenty-four year period, I noticed something curious: Each had gone through at least one period of pronounced adversity—many serious enough to threaten the firm’s life. Even more curious, when I interviewed people in those top performing companies and asked them how they had built such great companies—many pointed to those periods of adversity as being most important to their firms’ success.

That set me on a path of discovery that turned upside down my views of personal and business success. Great companies, I learned, emerge not from the absence of difficulty, but from its vortex. And what is true for organizations is also true of people. Resilience, the ability to effectively handle adversity, may just be the most important characteristic of all.

There is a lot of great work going on right now in the study of resilience—in scientific research labs and in places as diverse as the battlefield and athletic competition. Bounce is a distillation of some of the most important things we know about resilience—packaged in the form of a leadership fable that is designed to give the reader six simple things he can do to increase his own bounce and the bounce of his organization.