Less than 20 percent of new businesses last five years. Despite those daunting odds, three MBAs from the Class of 1998 are among the elite who succeeded, and their stories make compelling reading in a new book.

Former Washington Post reporter Bill Murphy Jr. tried his hand at entrepreneurship and, like most, failed. But the experience made him curious about the differences between entrepreneurial winners and losers. Having written a book about West Point, he resolved to turn his attention to “the West Point of capitalism”: HBS.

With cooperation from the School, he interviewed over 100 MBA entrepreneurs from the late 1990s and winnowed the lot down to three: Marla Malcolm Beck, Chris Michel, and Marc Cenedella. From their stories, he derived key lessons learned, often the hard way, as they built successful businesses, created hundreds of jobs, and secured their financial futures. This start-up trio stars in Murphy’s book, The Intelligent Entrepreneur: How Three Harvard Business School Graduates Learned the 10 Rules of Successful Entrepreneurship. You can read an abbreviated account of his three subjects’ triumphs and stumbles in the December issue of the Bulletin.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have room to print Murphy’s 10 rules for entrepreneurial success in the magazine. So I’ve posted them here. Take a look and let us know what you think. Did he miss anything?

10 Rules of Successful Entrepreneurship

1. Commit first to the ideal of entrepreneurship. Successful founders commit to the ideal of entrepreneurship itself rather than to a single business model or product. That flexibility helps them react nimbly to market feedback, abandoning products and business models that aren’t working.

2. Look for problems to solve before creating business solutions. Most entrepreneurs start by choosing the product they want to make or the service they want to provide and then try to convince the market to buy it. It makes more sense to start a business the other way around: Identify what the market needs first, and then develop a solution.

3. Focus on innovation and scale. Despite what we’re taught, most entrepreneurs launch businesses in unattractive, static fields and offer no competitive advantage. Clearly, the most successful entrepreneurs combine their deep knowledge of customers’ needs with a commitment to achieving outsized scale and innovation.

4. Assemble founding teams with a history of working well together. Teams of two or three cofounders who complement and respect each other generally result in greater success than companies founded by individuals or those with larger teams. This is especially effective when the founders have worked together successfully before.

5. One cofounder is usually “first among equals.” Notwithstanding the previous rule, usually one of the cofounders in a successful venture proves to be the outsized, driving personality. That person’s quick decisions and a deep commitment can lead to stronger performance when times inevitably turn difficult.

6. Manage risk and don’t spend needlessly. Successful entrepreneurs focus on managing their risks to the point where launching a new company is not much more risky than most of the other professional choices they could make, and where the risk-adjusted return is higher. This requires skill in assembling stakeholders who can survive the loss of the assets they contribute if the worst happens.

7. Learning to lead requires a lifelong effort. Most entrepreneurs aspire to grow their small start-ups into large ventures, but different team sizes require different kinds of leadership. The most successful entrepreneurs read books, hire executive coaches, and recognize that continually learning to lead is a must.

8. Learning to sell requires a lifelong commitment. Ethical, effective sales technique is one of the most important attributes within new ventures but also one of the least common. The most successful entrepreneurs eventually understand that sales requires a balance between making compelling promises and ensuring that they can deliver on them.

9. Persistence means redefining failure. Successful entrepreneurs recognize their legitimate failures, and can talk about them reflectively. That said, they also focus on overcoming, learning, and ensuring that failure is never the end of the story.

10. Time, not money, is the scarcest resource. Successful entrepreneurs sometimes get rich, but they are also deeply motivated by the desire to accomplish worthwhile things: to create, to make a difference in people’s lives, and to leave a legacy for later generations. The most successful embrace entrepreneurship not just as a way of doing business but as a way of life.

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