There is a saying, “If you can’t travel the world, read a book”. The Best Business book is not only the one that teaches many good business techniques, but it should also be the one that gives you a strong motivation & inspiration to do some business on your own.
So, these are the 5 best business books:
1. The Innovator’s Dilemma
Clayton Christensen demonstrates how successful, outstanding companies can do everything “right” and yet still lose their market leadership – or even fail – as new, unexpected competitors rise and take over the market.
The key takeaway is the difference between radical and disruptive innovation. Most people confuse the two. Moreover, it also demonstrates that the leading cause of failure of established firms to disruptive innovations is not poor management. These firms had excellent managers, sound financial policies, and in some cases were the first to develop the prototype of disruptive innovation.
But since disruptive innovations are cheaper and simpler products that sell in small niche markets with lower gross margins, they just weren’t attractive enough to the established firms. Sustaining (incremental and radical) innovations promised more guaranteed returns and higher margins. With time, the disruptive innovations improved and toppled the established firms.
Christensen “received the Global Business Book Award for The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Economist named it as one of the six most important books about business ever written”
2. Good To Great
Jim Collins’ Good to Great follows the patterns of success that propel companies into greatness versus the behaviors of organizations that plateau. Among the characteristics of successful companies are strong leadership, great employees, and most importantly, a healthy, disciplined culture.
Key takeaways from Good To Great:
- Level 5 Leadership.
- First Who… Then What
- Confront the Brutal Facts
- Hedgehog Concept.
- Culture of Discipline
- The Flywheel
3. Crossing The Chasm
Crossing the Chasm is a marketing book by Geoffrey A. Moore that focuses on the specifics of marketing high tech products during the early start-up period. Moore’s exploration and expansion of the diffusions of innovations model has had a significant and lasting impact on high tech entrepreneurship.
Moore organized the book across seven chapters arranged in two parts. Part one focuses on the chasm and part two discusses how to cross the chasm. As I noted, part two is roughly described as the Normandy Invasion.
Moore groups customers by where they are most likely to buy in your product’s life cycle. Each of these categories is then analyzed and you are shown how best to market to each of these groups:
Innovators
Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively … because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what function it is performing.
This group is obviously the easiest to persuade to try out your product. They become pivotal in pushing your product along to the next group.
Early Adopters
Early Adopters … buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle … they are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these potential benefits to their concerns.
These influencing individuals will help give credibility to your product in your attempts to move to the mainstream public.
Early Majority
The Early Majority … are driven by a strong sense of practicality. They know that many of these new-fangled inventions end up as passing fads, so they are content to wait and see how other people are making out before they buy in themselves.
Late Majority
They wait until something has become an established standard, and even then they want to see lots of support and tend to buy, therefore, from large, well-established companies.
Laggards
These people simply don’t want anything to do with new technology
Don’t waste your energy on this group. In fact, it may be more valuable to focus on a new product by the time you hit this part of the customer base.
4. The Lean Startup
Ries has organized The Lean Startup into three sections:
- Vision: lays the foundations for you to understand Lean Startup. It explains what an entrepreneur is and how startups experiment to learn.
- Steer: covers the meat of the Lean Startup process, including the Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop.
- Accelerate covers how to progress through the Build-Measure-Learn Loop faster, even as you scale.
The most useful part of the book, which includes the Lean Startup process is section two, Steer, so this is where we’ll spend most of our time in this book summary.
Although the book is in three sections, there are five critical Lean Startup principles relevant to all parts of the book:
Entrepreneurs are Everywhere
Entrepreneurs don’t just exist in garages but also in large corporations and government organizations.
In large organizations, it’s up to the leadership to create an environment that will allow entrepreneurship and experimentation to flourish.
Entrepreneurship is management
Although it’s not like traditional management such as you might learn on an MBA, entrepreneurship is still manageable. One where the management approach must be tailored to the specific needs of a startup – namely an environment of extreme uncertainty.
Validated learning
The job of your startup is to learn what your customers want in such a way that you can build a sustainable business. You conduct this learning in as scientific a way as possible.
Build-Measure-Learn
This loop is the fundamental activity of a startup. Iterating through this loop helps you learn. The faster you iterate through it, the faster you’ll learn and make progress.
Innovation Accounting
It gives us the tools to measure if our startup is making progress.
5. How to win friends & influence people
Improving one’s communication and relationships with other people is an important topic. This book is solely about human and human behavior. It teaches you to embrace a slight shift in your behavior. Encourage you to make adjustments in your behavior to make other people like you
The great aspect of this book is that the concepts stated in the book are convenient for almost everyone to use. They will assist you in making a good first impression, in having a great conversation with others, in criticizing people the right way, and so on. It might sound like an uninteresting book now, but it could easily turn out to be one of the most valuable ones you will read.
How to win friends and influence people has definitely been a life-changing book for me due to its relevance to my life. After grasping the lessons from this book, I have become a more confident person and have started to enjoy interacting with people outside my social circle.
