The Genius Behind Jenga She created a toy famous for collapsing. Fortunately, her company has done anything but.

Which is a point she makes at the start of the first chapter in About Jenga: The Remarkable Business of Creating a Game that Became a Household Name (Greanleaf Book Group Press), which just hit stores.

"People who know about Jenga are usually surprised when I tell them that I created the game," writes Scott. "Many seem as incredulous as they would be if I had told them that I had invented the wheel. Having played it for years or, in some cases, so they tell me, 'all my life' -- which is entirely possible if they are under thirty -- they assume Jenga has been around forever."

Not that Scott, who will turn 54 this December, has ever said she wrote the book to let people know that she is the one behind the game, but, boy, if you had created a global phenomenon, wouldn't you want a little recognition?

How Jenga Began

In 1983, Scott was a 23-year-old college dropout, living and working in Oxford, England, when she quit her marketing job at Intel, the now-legendary semiconductor chip company, to begin manufacturing and selling a game she had created as a 17-year-old. It was an idea that had come to her one day while mindlessly playing with her younger brother's wooden blocks.

(In case you've never been exposed to Jenga, it has a strikingly simple concept: you play with a tower of blocks, in which people remove a block at a time and stack onto the top; the first person who removes a block and causes it to collapse, loses; the last person to remove a block without knocking it over, wins.)

Scott likely had more free time to contemplate and create than most of her teenage counterparts. With her father's career in the oil business taking them away from England, she grew up in East Africa, where she was born, and then Ghana. It was an exotic and adventurous lifestyle in many ways, but she wasn't rushing off to the shopping mall or movies with her friends all the time. There was ample time to hang out with her family and play board games and in general while away the hours, think, and stack wooden blocks.

Six years later, she had a handful of sets of the game that she had had made at a saw mill in Ghana, and Scott couldn't help but think that she might have something special. She did, of course. But it took awhile for her game to gain traction. She launched her game in London in 1983, but three years into her new business, Scott was approximately 150 pounds in debt, much of it to her mother, who had put up her own house as security.

Scott paid back that debt, of course. In 1986, Milton Bradley bought the rights to sell Jenga in the United States, and there's really been no looking back. To date, approximately 50 million Jenga games have been sold.

How Scott Did It

Of course, if you're an established or aspiring entrepreneur, this all begs the question: How in the heck can I emulate this success?

If I knew, I wouldn't be here writing this article, of course; I'd be sipping a Margarita somewhere on an island beach, but after a conversation with Leslie Scott, who came off as affable and charming as can be, I have a few thoughts.

Be confident: When asked if she is surprised by her success, Scott says that she isn't. "Well, I had an idea that I took to market, and I went off assuming it would be a success, so I'm not surprised," says Scott. "I'm always told, 'You couldn't have possibly dreamed you'd be this successful,' but I did."

That you should be confident when you jump into any entrepreneurial endeavor may be pretty obvious, but it's easier said than done if you know the odds you're up against. That Scott didn't know probably helped her. She admits she entered the toy industry with "an enormously naïve assumption."

Know your market -- or don't: That's the frustrating thing about writing any article, frankly, where you're supposed to learn from someone else's success. Scott's advice is "to identity your market very carefully," and it's great, solid, practical advice. She did it with the other 40 games she designed or helped design, like The Great Western Railway, The Hieroglyphics Game, Bookworm, Inns and Taverns and many others. But it's Jenga that everyone has heard of, and in that case, she didn't do any serious market research.

"I think the timing of the game was pretty significant," says Scott. "I first took it to market in 1983, and I think it was the year before when Trivial Pursuit came to market and was successful." (She is correct. It was created in 1979 but put out on the market in 1982.) "Video games were hugely popular," continues Scott, "and there was this assumption that the video game market would cancel out the board game market as well, but Trivial Pursuit had proven that wasn't the case."

As Scott recalls, the toy industry was thrilled with Trivial Pursuit and was actively looking for the next big thing in board games -- and Jenga fit the bill. True, Jenga isn't a board game, but it was close enough (it's best played with several people).

So one could conclude -- ignore the rules -- just put out a game and see if it goes somewhere. But because the odds are so ridiculously high of that happening, Scott continued to achieve success as a toy designer, licensing her creations with major toy companies, because she did do market research and knew she had consumers who would buy her games.

Make sure you have clear terms with anyone you partner with: Scott had a bad experience with her agent, as she details in her book. Basically, naturally, he wanted more money than Scott felt he was entitled to. Scott advises, "Be very cautious and honest about what your expectations are before you go into business. Either get a third, disinterested party who will ask the right questions or a lawyer, though I realize if you're just starting out, an attorney can cost you an arm and a leg at a time when you don't have any money."

Turn to your friends and family: "I know there's always this perceived wisdom that you don't do business with friends and family," muses Scott, "but if you're just starting out, who else are you going to do business with if not your family and friends? Frankly, banks aren't handing out money to untried companies. If you don't have a record of success, they're not going to support you, or at least it'll be extremely difficult to get funding. You almost invariably have to turn to people you know for help."

Have fun: That's the one big message Scott says she hopes readers take away from her book, "that it's fun to take an idea to market and see it develop. To have created something that people like, that's very exciting."

And what's reassuring is, even a quarter of a century later, Scott, who still lives in Oxford, England, continues to get jazzed when she sees a customer in a store buy Jenga or one of her other games. She felt a rush that most of us can just imagine recently when she was watching an episode of the animated series Family Guy and she saw the wisecracking baby, Stewie, playing Jenga with his babysitter. "That was a huge thrill," she says.

Understand the Catch 22 involving marketing an original product or service: "It's very tricky to come up with something totally original, and then it's very difficult to market something totally original, because there's nothing to compare it to," says Scott, who at about this moment, admits: "I wrote the book trying to answer the question as to why Jenga has been so successful, and I'm not sure I even actually answered the question, but it's been fun exploring it. You know, I think it was a lot of luck, and I guess, at the core, it was a good game."

Oh, yeah. A good product. There is that, too. It's just a crazy enough idea that it might work.