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I have always believed that a person really doesn’t learn much from success. Don’t get me wrong…I have nothing against success and I have always preferred it to failure. But, I never really learned much from it. When something worked, it just worked. What was there to learn? But, when something failed…really bombed…I certainly learned from that. I definitely discovered what NOT to do. Will Rogers once said, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment”. Thomas Edison remarked that, “I found five thousand ways how not to make a light bulb” after so many of his experiments had failed. Then, finally, one experiment succeeded and the electric light was born. Like Edison, when faced with failure a person must learn to look for and examine its causes and then formulate a plan to remedy the problem. This is called active “Learning”. One must then seek out and act in ways that will not result in the same negative outcomes. Speaking from experience, sometimes it is even conceivable for a person to make the same mistake twice.
In making the decision to write this set of books (Complete Set), an interesting question was posed to me. Can a person entering the retail furniture industry really learn about the business by reading about it in a book? Some may believe that a new entrant must actually live it, must experience the business firsthand in order to really ‘get it’. Of course, there is a lot of truth to this. The knowledge and understanding a person gains sure sticks better when it has been lived. In these volumes (Furniture Retailing 101: The Business; Furniture Retailing 101: The Merchandise; Furniture Retailing 101: The Strategic Concepts), I have attempted to offer the next best thing to first hand experience. I have tried to write of ‘second hand’ experiences. The books are intended to provide a foundation, some of the basics of the business, and is not meant to be the definitive source for all knowledge about the furniture industry. It is simply a place to begin learning.