Every entrepreneur needs inspiration to continue with the venture that s/he has set up. The success stories and the ups and downs encountered by people in this field is something they can definitely learn from.
Here’s a list of books every aspiring entrepreneur must read:
The Lean Startup
In this business book, author and entrepreneur Eric Ries takes us through the lean startup approach, which has changed the way that many startup founders seek to build companies and launch new products—largely based around the principle of rapid idea validation before investing heavily into an idea. His definition of a startup is broad, any business from a solopreneur, blogger or freelancer operating out of their garage to a venture-backed project within a Fortune 500 company, as long as you’re determined to discover a successful path to building a sustainable business.
The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs a way to validate business ideas, test their visions continuously, to adapt and modify before any real damage is done. This business book provides a new approach to successfully managing a startup and also talks through some of the innovative online business tools that can help you accelerate your path towards validation along the way.
The Peter Principle
The Peter Principle is based on the logical idea that competent employees will continue to be promoted, but at some point will be promoted into positions for which they are incompetent, and they will then remain in those positions because of the fact that they do not demonstrate any further competence that would get them recognized for additional promotion. According to the Peter Principle, every position in a given hierarchy will eventually be filled by employees who are incompetent to fulfil the job duties of their respective positions.
The Disney Way
Here are some of the things you can learn from The Disney Way:
- How to give every member of your organization a chance to dream
- How to stand firm on your beliefs and principles
- How to treat your customers like guests
- How to support, enable, and reward employees
- How to build long-term relationships
- How to dare to take calculated risks
- How to align long-term vision with short-term execution
- How to use storyboarding to make your dreams come true
- How to demonstrate ‘love’ for employees, customers, products, and yourself
Behind The Cloud
Lesson 1: Focus your marketing on the end user of your product, even if you’re in B2B.
Lesson 2: Always do what’s best for the customer, even if it scares you and might hurt your business.
Lesson 3: When going global, remember to respect the context of other cultures.