- ISBN13: 9781608320028
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Millions have played the game Jenga, but few know the surprising story of the woman who created the game. From cattle ranches in Africa to the royal tennis courts in London, the story of Leslie Scott and Jenga weaves an adventurous tale of personal triumph and business success with keen insights into the secrets behind launching one of the best-known brands in the world.
An English expatriate born and raised in Africa, Scott became a phenomenally successful woman in the male-dominated toy business through relentless curiosity and tenacious belief. Her unconventional path to success was driven by her unorthodox approach, her penchant for risk, and her passion for adventure. Along the way, she came to understand how certain ideas transform themselves into successful products. Through expert storytelling, Scott illuminates basic business concepts with unconventional linkages from explaining what African cattle and medieval heraldry can teach us about branding to discovering the keys to market differentiation by examining a coral reef.
Scott entertains with style, grace, and free-flowing intellect. Enter a fascinating world of creative success, practical business lessons, and hilarious but true stories.
Jenga, one of the world’s classic games, has sold over 50 million sets and its appeal shows no sign of slackening. Many of those who, like me, have spent happy hours, breath held, adding bricks to its tottering towers or whooping with delight as a rival brought the whole edifice toppling down, must have wondered what lay behind this fascinating game – just who invented it and why and how it became such an international phenomenon. In this wonderful book I found all the answers and much more.
Leslie Scott, its inventor, reveals the roots of Jenga (`Build!’ in Swahili) in the games her ex-pat family played in 1950s Kenya. But it was one Sunday morning as an under-employed macramé-teacher in 1970s East Oxford that she woke up and realised its commercial possibilities. About Jenga tells of the challenges and obstacles she overcame on the way to making her dream reality – the collisions with bank managers and debt collectors, predatory agents and big-time players, sinister flatterers and shady copycats as well as the unexpected allies and good angels who helped her on the path to success.
Reading it, I realised I had at last found a model business book – one with a human face, rich in lessons for entrepreneurs and all those seeking to take a new idea to market, but written with great wit, learning and fluent clarity and blessedly free of the jargon or the self-deluding vanity that disfigures so many of the books in this area.
Embedded in it I also found much more – a moving family memoir, not to mention a vivid and personal chunk of social history over the last four decades, telling how Leslie Scott took her first faltering steps in the then male-dominated world of business.
This makes About Jenga sound portentous and does not do justice to the many delightful comic vignettes studding its pages. I almost rolled on the floor with laughter reading about one incident, when Scott, then Intel’s first UK marketing manager, shared premises with the Potato Marketing Board. One day a Board representative marched in and plonked down a sack of a new type of spuds and asked her in all seriousness to report on their suitability for the new culinary product – microchips – that he had heard she was preparing.
Circling out from her experiences, Scott – an unusual and engaging blend of businesswoman and Oxford intellectual – offers interesting reflections on the role of branding not just in business but also in art, history and nature (she devotes, incidentally, some of her earnings from Jenga to supporting a zoological and ecological research station in Kenya), on metaphor and the larger relationship between games, life and business.
How best to characterise this strange, multifaceted book? Perhaps as the journey of an intelligent, if somewhat naïve and Candide-like, young woman through an Alice-in-Wonderland world and her attempts, then and now, to make sense of it. Buy it, read it. Like the game it celebrates, I predict it could well become a cult classic. With its humour, rich layering and period background, it would make a fabulous film or TV docu-drama. Agents and producers, please note.
Jenga
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (10/09)
I have to start this review with a confession. I had never heard of Jenga before I started reading Leslie Scott’s “About Jenga,” so I had no real idea what to expect. Even after reading the first few pages, I still did not know exactly what kind of a game Ms. Scott was talking about, yet by that point it simply did not matter any more. I was enthralled by the unfolding story and thoroughly entertained throughout it.
If I had to classify “About Jenga,” I would find it really hard to decide whether to call it a memoir, a business manual, a story of a journey or simply a grandly entertaining and truly intriguing tale of a brilliant mind. The account of one woman’s idea about a new, outwardly very simple, yet greatly addictive game and the path this idea took was simply fascinating. It mattered little whether Ms. Scott was talking directly about Jenga or about any of thereto sometimes loosely connected ideas, events and influences – I wanted to know more. I found myself running to my computer to delve deeper into some of the facts and ideas she mentioned in her book, I found myself stopping and thinking, “Oh, that’s why!” and more often than not, I simply found myself admiring the brilliant and witty writing style.
English by definition, but born and raised in Africa, Leslie Scott developed a challenging and very competitive game of Jenga from some simple wooden blocks that were made for her family while they were still living in Africa. Her quest to market and properly protect her invention was not easy and straightforward, and anybody trying to launch a new idea or a new product could greatly benefit from reading “About Jenga.” Ms. Scott’s narrative deftly presents a great number of valuable insights into business concepts and practices, but does not simply stop there. The parts that I found particularly astute were those dealing with protection of intellectual property and the intricacies of branding.
“About Jenga” by Leslie Scott is a book that can and should be enjoyed on many levels. If you simply read it as an account of a beguiling mission to profitably market an idea, I am convinced you will enjoy it greatly. If you take it as a handy manual on how to proceed with your business venture, it should help you avoid countless snares that one usually encounters while doing that. Even if you have no interest whatsoever in the business side of it, I am certain that the ease and grace with which Ms. Scott writes will enchant and delight you. Fresh, engaging and endlessly intellectually stimulating, this book will without a doubt delight a vast circle of very different readers.
Amazon User Rating: 5 / 5