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Here are
just a few of the seminal business books that most
entrepreneurs and business owners should not be without.
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.
We like Gerber's book -- about the templates
entrepreneurs need to build for their businesses to
ensure the businesses are run by systems and processes,
or best practices -- because it stresses the foundation
of our own business philosophy: if you can
identify a way of doing business, you can find out the
best way of doing it, and once you identify the
best way, you can articulate that way in the form of
processes for standardized use by others. That's
how you come to own a company, rather than to be
owned by a company -- which is just like the jobs
you've fled.
Good
to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . And
Others Don't by Jim Collins.
Collins and his team spent years researching the
differences between merely good companies and great
companies. They've distilled their conclusions
about the reasons some companies never really take off,
while others do, into this highly readable book.
Crossing the Chasm
by Geoffrey A. Moore. The classic from the
adolescence of the Silicon Valley days. Still a
great way to think about starting up businesses.
Never attack a well-defended beachhead. And so on.
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
by Roger Fisher. You can read this book in an hour
or two. You will and should apply it long after.
It nicely summarizes how to be creative in getting to
win-win agreements -- by focusing on interests
rather than just positions. Do you understand the
difference? Do you know how to probe the latter to
get to the former? If not, check it out.
Also see an article on
conflict resolution and relationship communication
that borrows generally from my training with Fisher at
Harvard's Negotiation Project.
The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want To Be
by Jack Canfield. A great introduction to the most
recent knowledge on how to identify, set, review,
visualize, and reach goals you wouldn't dream possible,
without knowing and trying these techniques.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell. The latest book from the
author of "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" Gladwell isn't
always as original as the business types seem to think
(these are the same people who unaccountably kept
"Who Moved My Cheese?" on the bestseller lists
for over a year), but he
does great research and knows how to tell a story.
And he's a real writer, which is nice.
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