The world of entrepreneurship has been my driving passion for decades. Why? It is entrepreneurs, despite their many quirks, who make the world a better place. It’s entrepreneurs who create jobs in a world where jobs in many places are in short supply. It’s entrepreneurs who wake up every day with a passion to forge their own path with the freedom to do so. And it’s why I embarked at mid-life on a second career as a business-school professor. It’s why I teach and why I write. The books I suggest here will give you a fighting chance to deal effectively with the challenges you’ll surely find along your entrepreneurial journey.
I wrote...
Break the Rules!: The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World
I love this classic book because it helps entrepreneurs think bigger and more nobly about what they are trying to accomplish. Fact: Nearly all of the world’s net new jobs are created by entrepreneurs leading fast-growing ventures.
I want every entrepreneur to think bigger and ‘make the world a better place’ in one way or another.
This book describes how one Silicon Valley insider has blazed a path of professional - and personal - success playing the game by his own rules. Silicon Valley is filled with garage-to-riches stories and hot young entrepreneurs with big ideas. Yet even in this place where the exceptional is common, Randy Komisar is a breed apart. Currently a "Virtual CEO" who provides "leadership on demand" for several renowned companies, Komisar was recently described by the "Washington Post" as a "combined professional mentor, minister without portfolio, in-your-face investor, trouble-shooter and door opener." But even more interesting than what he does is…
This book packs more value for entrepreneurs into its 136 pages than any other book I know. It solves a problem every entrepreneur faces in talking with others about whether their idea is any good: they lie to you!
What you want is honest info about their needs, not what your Mom or your loving Grandmother would gratuitously tell you! This fabulous little book shows how.
The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.
They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .…
In his years leading innovation efforts as Google’s Director of Engineering, Savoia learned that what you really need to figure out if your newfangled idea will sell is YODA: Your Own DAta.
Conventional market research simply isn’t going to cut it, as the Law of Market Failure (that the vast majority of new products and new ventures fail) is brutal. You need to know how customers will react to the thing you are trying to build.
I love the ingenuity of the methods Savoia reveals, including ‘’pretotyping” (to test product-market fit) before you build a prototype, to name just one. Indispensable advice throughout, in my view.
The Law of Market Failure: Most new products will fail in the market, even if competently executed.
Using his experience at Google, his remarkable success as an entrepreneur and consultant, and insights from his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia's The Right It offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure.
Millions of people around the world are working hard to bring to life new ideas. Some of these ideas will turn out to be stunning successes that will have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next…
Zook and Allen are two of the most insightful people I know. I’ve taught their “stuff’ to my students for many years. Entrepreneurship is a journey that’s not for the faint of heart, for there are the inevitable gale-force winds that threaten to blow you off course, as this book so clearly demonstrates.
If every founder would imbue his or her company with the founder’s mentality and follow Zook’s and Allen’s advice about how to keep it in place, we’d have far more long-run successes than today’s daunting failure statistics so sadly display.
A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing--and Avoiding--the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external--increasing distance from the front lines, loss…
Jim Collins’ best book is the most pragmatic and most useful business book I’ve ever read. Period. From “getting the right people on the bus” to “the hedgehog concept” and more, the fundamentals entailed in creating a truly great business are all here. What more need I say?
________________________________ Can a good company become a great one? If so, how?
After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising - at times even shocking - to the modern mind.
Good to Great achieves a rare distinction: a management book full of vital ideas that reads as well as a fast-paced novel. It is widely regarded…
Have you ever wondered what it is that sets successful entrepreneurs apart from other businesspeople and enables their success? A few years ago, I set out to find an answer. Sure, they’re passionate about changing their corner of the world for the better. Sure, they’re more tolerant of risk and uncertainty than the average Joe. But so, too, are those leading most companies today.
Drawing on more than two decades of my own research developing case studies on some of the world’s most intrepid entrepreneurs, I found an answer: their mindsets. This book's six mindsets fly in the face of what’s taught these days about how to run a successful business, and run counter to the conventional wisdom found in most large companies.
