Chosen as one of the Daily Mail's Memoirs of the Year Tim Waterstone is one of Britain's most successful businessmen, having built the Waterstone's empire that started with one small bookshop in 1982. In this charming and evocative memoir, he recalls the childhood experiences that led him to become an entrepreneur and outlines the business philosophy that allowed Waterstone's to dominate the bookselling business throughout the country. Tim explores his formative years in a small town in rural England at the end of the Second World War, and the troubled relationship he had with his father, before moving on to the epiphany he had while studying at Cambridge, which set him on the road to Waterstone's and gave birth to the creative strategy that made him a high street name.

Waterstone's was DTI awarded as one of the three most financially successful business start-ups of the 1980s and, culturally, may be considered to have changed the complexion and scale of bookselling in the British isles and Europe. This massive success is in no small way due to Tim Waterstone's excellent business practices and belief that business can work for the good of the community. In this book he shares his top ten rules for creating businesses and making lives, using real-life case studies of how businesse succeed, and also how they can fail. Essential reading for anyone with a dream of starting up alone.