Michael J. Coles, the cofounder of the Great Amer­i­can Cook­ie Com­pa­ny and the for­mer CEO of Cari­bou Cof­fee, did not fol­low a con­ven­tion­al path into busi­ness. He does not have an Ivy League pedi­gree or an MBA from a top-ten busi­ness school. He grew up poor, start­ing work at the age of thir­teen. He had many false starts and painful defeats, but Coles has a habit of defy­ing expec­ta­tions. His life and career have been about turn­ing obsta­cles into oppor­tu­ni­ties, tragedies into tri­umphs, and pover­ty into phil­an­thropy. In Time to Get Tough, Coles explains how he start­ed a $100-mil­lion com­pa­ny with only $8,000, over­came a near-fatal motor­cy­cle acci­dent, ran for the U.S. Con­gress, and set three transcon­ti­nen­tal bicy­cling world records. His sto­ry also offers a first­hand per­spec­tive on the busi­ness, polit­i­cal, and phil­an­thropic cli­mate in the last quar­ter of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and serves as an impor­tant case study for any­one inter­est­ed in over­com­ing a seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able chal­lenge. Read­ers will also dis­cov­er prac­ti­cal lead­er­ship lessons and uncon­ven­tion­al ways of approach­ing busi­ness and life.