The Disruptors: How 15 Successful Businesses Defied the Norm

Journalist Percy (21st Century Business Icons) provides a competent examination of how A24, Nintendo, and Spotify, among other companies, got ahead by tearing up the rule book. Explaining how independent film production house A24 carved a niche for itself by putting out more movies with lower budgets than the major studios, Percy notes only one or two A24 films need to become hits for the company to turn a profit. Nintendo has maintained its “market dominance over time through its... willingness to pivot,” Percy contends, describing how the company transitioned from selling playing cards to manufacturing toys in the 1950s, and then from designing arcade games to making gaming consoles in the 1980s. Elsewhere, Percy explores how clever positioning helped raise customer awareness of Beyond Meat (she contends that deals with supermarkets to stock the company’s products alongside actual meat was crucial to introducing shoppers to the brand), and how OpenAI’s founding commitment to an “ethos of openness and knowledge-sharing” attracted idealistic engineers who fueled the company’s ascent. Percy fulfills her promise to identify the heterodox business strategies driving the success of some of today’s most well-recognized brands, though the workmanlike company histories sometimes read like Wikipedia entries. Still, this gets the job done. (Sept.)