On Internet Business

Business books to read in 2010

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Leadership

Here’s a round-up of some of the best business books I’ve read in recent months – there’s something here for every entrepreneur:

Great Game of Business, author J. Stack – When first published in 1992 this book contained the seminal ‘The Higher Laws of Business’

1. You get what you give.
2. It’s easy to stop one guy, but it’s pretty hard to stop 100.
3. What goes around comes around.
4. You do what you gotta do.
5. You gotta wanna.
6. You can sometimes fool the fans, but you can never fool the players.
7. When you raise the bottom, the top rises.
8. When people set their own targets, they usually hit them.
9. If nobody pays attention, people stop caring.
10. As they say in Missouri: Shit rolls downhill. In other words, change begins at the top.

To which Stack adds ‘The Ultimate Higher Law’ = when you appeal to the highest level of thinking, you get the highest level of performance.

This book is ideal for businesses focused on teamwork as it contains insightful information on how to get individuals focused and working together to achieve business success.

E-myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber – In an almost opposite way to the previous book, this one aims to fix the work life/balance for the entrepreneur.

Gerber feels that almost everyone who launches a business is a technician and will sooner or later suffer from Entrepreneurship seizure – the E-myth. He says small businesses do not work out because the technician-founder is working IN rather than ON the business, in other words is managing the mechanics rather than the strategy. Gerber takes the reader through installing systems in the business so that anybody can run it. The systems, not the individuals run the business. McDonalds is the key example here – with a constant workforce turnover, it still operates effectively because the systems keep the business going, not the people.

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Customers – author Geoffrey A Moore – This is a little more specialised, but it’s a book that reveals how high-tech products require marketing strategies completely different to those used in other industries. Moore offers ‘chasm theory’ which shows why high-technology products initially sell well to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull (the chasm) as they endeavour to cross over to mainstream buyers. But the book isn’t merely descriptive, it offers solutions to the problem by showing how to cross the chasm by getting marketing professionals to create profiles and target specific sections of the population rather than aiming straight for mainstream success, and uses examples such as Apple, Oracle, and Sun to elaborate the theory.

Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book by Jack and Suzy Welch – Jack Welch’s personal life is perhaps nothing to boast about in terms of work/life balance, but he does offer some of the most simple, powerful and proven management practices in the business today. His message is simple and clear if you: empower others, ask questions, tap into the potential of all of your associates, choose integrity and honesty over charts, graphs, and politics, and spend more time in action than slaving over budgets, you’ll achieve entrepreneurial success. One of the best sections of this book is the list of questions that need to be answered to develop a winning strategy – another real take-way gem is the material on how to take the pain out of agreeing budgets.

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