I’ve learned a lot of what I know about entrepreneurship from doing and I’ve been very lucky to have a series of great entrepreneurial learning experiences over the years. Those experiences are what Ariel calls “going to the gym for business”. If you want to be a baseball player in the real game, you’d better go to the gym and practice first. The same is true for business which is why I strongly encourage anyone who wants to eventually be an entrepreneur or to work for an entrepreneurial high-growth company to get their practice in an entrepreneurial environment, not a consulting firm or on Wall Street.
As valuable as experience is, some of the cheapest learning you can buy can be acquired from books. In no particular order, here’s a short list of books that I’ve found useful over the years:
- Working with emotional intelligence by Goleman – Business would be easy if it were not for the people. It all looks so simple in a financial model: “add revenue, reduce costs pull the auto-fill in Excel…”. Being good at the people side of the business is not an impediment to the job of a leader, it is the job.
- Startup by Kaplan – great story about an entrepreneurial endeavor and about being WAY too early to a market (handheld computing). A real classic.
- Fire in the Valley – a history of Silicon Valley.
- Influence by Cialdini
- Small Giants by Burlingham – All about companies that choose quality over volume.
- The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the business of life by Schroeder. A fantastic book about Buffet, his life, and his approach to business and investing.
- Will and Vision – an examination of why fast followers and market latecomers often end up winning.
- Good to great by Collins. Several of the companies featured have gone from Good to Great to Bankrupt (Circuit City for example) but some of the core lessons of the book are still very valuable.
- How to Advertise by Roman and Maas. It’s really more about marketing than it is about advertising. It’s a good high level introduction to marketing.
- Building Strong Brands by Aaker. A good introduction to brand management and brand development.
- When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Lowenstein. Beware geeks bearing black box algorithms that promise to yield high returns with little to no risk.
- Pour Your Heart Into It by Schultz and Yang. Howard Schultz tells the story of going to Italy on vacation, seeing how Italians drink coffee, deciding that Americans could and should do it similarly and then buying a small Seattle coffee chain and turning it into an empire. He talks of both the visionary and practical elements required in building Starbucks over the years.
- Fooled by Randomness by Taleb. Before the bubble burst and he became famous, he wrote this fantastic book about the role of luck in the markets and in life.
What books would you add to the list?
