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100 Great Businesses and the Minds Behind Them
Fry, Fred
Journal of Small Business Strategy; Fall 2007/Winter 2008; 18, 2; ABI/INFORM Complete
pg. 104

Book Review 
100 Great Businesses and the Minds Behind Them 

By Emily Ross and Angus Holland 
Sourcebooks, Inc.: Naperville, IL: 2006 

Reviewed by 
Fred Fry 

Bradley University 

So you already know that Michael Dell and Bill 
Gates dropped out of their universities, and 
perhaps you know that Phil Knight sold tennis 
shoes out of the trunk of a Plymouth Valiant at 
athletic meets. But did you also know that 
Warren Buffet had five paper routes before 
school when he was thirteen and that he bought 
his first share of stock at age eleven? And did 
you know that Oprah Winfrey was raised on a 
pig farm in Missi-ssippi and that her parents 
wanted to name her Orpah after a character 
from the Bible but misspelled her name? Or 
how about that IKEA was started in a shed that 
had been used to store milk churns? And 
Clarence Birdseye got the idea for frozen 
vegetables while working as a naturalist in the 
Arctic Circle. 

Such is the stuff from a wonderful book, 100 
Great Businesses and the Minds Behind Them 
by Emily Ross and Angus Holland. I'm not 
sure the book was intended as a trivia book; it 
more likely was supposed to be a business 
history book. It is great as both. The authors 
break the book into 22 chapters although I am 
not sure what their logic was. Never mind, 
because the chapters are then broken into the 
100 vignettes about the beginnings and 
development of bus-inesses we all know. We 
find, for example, that in-line skates were 
invented back in the 1700s, long before Scott 
Olson perfected the idea and called them 
Rollerblades. Liquid Paper was once called 
Mistake Out. Play-Doh had been sold for years 
as Magic Wall-paper Cleaner before Joe 

McVicker put it in cans for use as modeling 
clay. Now sold by Hasbro, more than two 
billion cans have made it into the hands of 
eager children. 

100 Great Businesses is a great book for a 
number of reasons. It is an excellent exa-mple 
of what I call an airplane book. That is, if you 
are flying from Chicago to Los Angeles, you 
can pretty well finish the book in one flight. Its 
short vignettes, each two to four pages in 
length, are also perfect for easy reading after 
finishing a day of teaching or heavy research. 
Another excellent use of the book is for a one-
hour honors course in entrepreneurship. Ask 
stud-ents to read a do-zen or so selected 
vignettes and then look for commonalities. Are 
there any similarities between Tupperware, 
Home Depot, eBay, and MTV? The final great 
use of 100 Great Businesses is as a source of 
business facts and trivia. You are bound to be 
the hit of the coffee shop discussions as you 
become an expert on little known facts about a 
lot of businesses. The book makes a great gift, 
as it was for me. As a paperback, it sells for 
$16.95, so it would be a nice token gift for a 
guest speaker, a graduation gift for a favorite 
student, or a holiday gift exchange. 

All in all, 100 Great Businesses and the Minds 
Behind Them is a delightful book, well written, 
interesting, and a great source of information. I 
recommend it. 

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