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Ask HN: Your top business book recommendations?
What book (or resource) has been the single most influential on your business?
- hga 16y agoThe Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen (http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-Essentials/dp/0060521996/ http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Busin...)
- JarekS 16y agoGeoffrey A. Moore - Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
- mahipal 16y agoI've started reading The E-Myth Revisited (http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280/ http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...). Someone recommended it pretty highly on one of the previous HN book threads. I wish I'd read it two start-ups ago. It's downright scary how well he describes the exact path my companies took.
- hga 16y agoI believe that was me, although I wasn't sure how generally useful it would be for technology startups (the biggest lesson in the first edition was to build your business like you were going to franchise it; you can't really reduce software development into a franchise plan). What sort of companies were/are your startups?
- mahipal 16y agoThey were mobile software start-ups, and certainly there were plenty of other reasons that I left them behind. But the pattern he describes maps pretty well to my companies. As a Technician, I started a company focused around building what I loved to build (good software). To a certain point, it's easy for N co-founders to keep juggling all the balls that comprise running a business (rather than just writing code). This is the "Infancy Phase," and all was well, just as he describes. It was the "Adolescent Phase" of the business where everything fell apart. All the various things we were juggling became too much, and they started to fall by the wayside. In my specific companies, I think a big cause of this was trying to do too much in terms of product. And so I followed one of the paths he predicts--I threw my hands up, and started small again with a new company. The revelation that did it was pretty much exactly what he writes: You realize something you've avoided all these years... You don't own a business--you own a job... the worst job in the world! You can't close it when you want to... You can't leave it when you want to... You can't sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?
- billswift 16y agoEliyahu Goldratt The Goal http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271781/ http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/08... Felix Dennis How to Get Rich http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271781/ http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/08... which I found from a link here on HN last June.
- mrlyc 16y agoDavid Maister at http://davidmaister.com/ http://davidmaister.com/ I find him more practical than Drucker, Harvey-Jones and Robert Heller.
- ArabGeek 16y agoBusiness Model generations :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]