I read a lot of books on Kindle. One disadvantage is that I can't quickly look at my bookshelf for inspiration. So I created this virtual bookshelf with a few of my favourites instead.
Alexander Osterwalder
Business Model Generation is a practical, inspiring handbook for anyone striving to improve a business model or craft a new one.
1) Change the way you think about business models
Business Model Generation will teach you powerful and practical innovation techniques used today by leading companies worldwide. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a new business model or analyze and renovate an old one.
2) Co-created by 470 strategy practitioners
Business Model Generation practices what it preaches. Co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book was financed and produced independently of the traditional publishing industry. It features a tightly-integrated, visual, lie-flat design that enables immediate hands-on use.
3) Designed for doers
Business Model Generation is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new, innovative models of value creation: executives, consultants, entrepreneurs and leaders of all organizations.
Atul Gawande
The New York Times bestselling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist
We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.
In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.
An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.
Category Pirates
Legendary writers, the ones who stand the test of time, create a category of one.
They’re snow leopards.
Snow Leopard is the first writing advice book ever written through a Category Design lens. Inside, what you will not find are a bunch of nose-picky suggestions for how you can make your writing “better.” There will be no talk of comma placement, grammatical correctness, or a recap of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.”
Instead, you will internalize a completely new way of framing your ideas, stories, and insights to reach and resonate with the most people possible. Written by the world’s first “business writing band,” Category Pirates—made up of Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole—Snow Leopard shows you how to create a category for yourself, master the art of Obvious & Non-Obvious content, monetize in new ways, and enjoy a lifelong career of independence, creative freedom, and exponential financial upside.
In decades past, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, Leo Burnett, Gary Bencivenga, Al Ries & Jack Trout, and many more master communicators have all written about the psychology behind how messages spread. Snow Leopard builds on their work and, along with dozens of new insights and frameworks, roots this thinking in the Digital Age.
In this book you will
The Content A proven framework for becoming a differentiated Creator or CuratorWriter Business A comprehensive guide breaking down all the different ways writers & creators can monetize their work in the Digital Age.Content Marketing An insider’s take on why the growing content marketing industry is becoming more and more saturated (and the opportunity this creates for you).The Art Of Fresh A timeless framework for ensuring your ideas are original, unique, and highly differentiated.The Power of a A new way of thinking about “scaling yourself” on the Internet–and why you never want to be a “better version” of an existing thing.Quick Guide To A never-before-shared model for inventing new language to get ideas to “stick”—and the unfair advantage this creates.How To Write A Book That And dozens of insights from the world’s largest non-fiction study of business books, reverse-engineering books that grab people’s attention from books that flop.Whether you are a writer, creator, entrepreneur, executive, public speaker, investor, or industry thought leader, Snow Leopard is your guide for becoming known for a niche you own.
And experiencing the life-changing outcomes that come with being completely differentiated.
Dan Sullivan
The world's foremost entrepreneurial coach shows you how to make a mindset shift that opens the door to explosive growth and limitless possibility--in your business and your life.Have you ever had a new idea or a goal that excites you... but not enough time to execute it? What about a goal you really want to accomplish...but can't because instead of taking action, you procrastinate? Do you feel like the only way things are going to get done is if you do them? But what if it wasn't that way? What if you had a team of people around you that helped you accomplish your goals (while you helped them accomplish theirs)?When we want something done, we've been trained to ask "How can I do this?" Well, there is a better question to ask. One that unlocks a whole new world of ease and accomplishment. Expert coach Dan Sullivan knows the question we should ask "Who can do this for me?"This may seem simple. And it is. But don't let the lack of complexity fool you. By mastering this question, you will quickly learn how billionaires and successful entrepreneurs like Dan build incredible businesses and personal freedom.This book will teach you how to make this essential paradigm-shift so you * Build a successful business effectively while not killing yourself * Immediately free-up 1,000+ hours of work that you shouldn't be doing anyway * Bypass the typical scarcity and decline of aging and other societal norms * Increase your vision in all areas of life and build teams of WHOs to support you in that vision * Never be limited in your goals and ambitions again * Expand your abundance of wealth, innovation, relationships, and joy * Build a life where everything you do is your choice--how you spend your time, how much money you make, the quality of your relationships, and the type of work you doMaking this shift involves retraining your brain to stop limiting your potential based on what you solely can do and instead focus on the nearly infinite and endless connections between yourself and other people as well as the limitless transformation possible through those connections.
Daniel Kahneman
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal is the gripping novel which is transforming management thinking throughout the Western world.
Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try and improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant—or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a colleague from student days—Jonah—to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done.
The story of Alex's fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC) developed by Eli Goldratt.
Eric Ries
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.
The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.
Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.
James C. Collins
A companion guidebook to the number-one bestselling Good to Great, focused on implementation of the flywheel concept, one of Jim Collins’ most memorable ideas that has been used across industries and the social sectors, and with startups.
The key to business success is not a single innovation or one plan. It is the act of turning the flywheel, slowly gaining momentum and eventually reaching a breakthrough. Building upon the flywheel concept introduced in his groundbreaking classic Good to Great, Jim Collins teaches readers how to create their own flywheel, how to accelerate the flywheel’s momentum, and how to stay on the flywheel in shifting markets and during times of turbulence.
Combining research from his Good to Great labs and case studies from organizations like Amazon, Vanguard, and the Cleveland Clinic which have turned their flywheels with outstanding results, Collins demonstrates that successful organizations can disrupt the world around them—and reach unprecedented success—by employing the flywheel concept.
Jeff Walker
Launch will build your business fast. Whether you've already got a business or you're itching to start one, this is a recipe for getting more traction.
Think about it: what if you could launch like Apple or the big Hollywood studios? What if your prospects eagerly counted down the days until they could buy your product? What if you could create such powerful positioning in your market that you all but eliminated your competition? And you could do all that no matter how humble your business or budget?
Since 1996 Jeff Walker has been creating hugely successful online launches. After bootstrapping his first Internet business from his basement, he quickly developed an underground process for launching new products and businesses with unprecedented success.
But the success-train was just getting started; once he started teaching his formula to other entrepreneurs, the results were simply breathtaking. Tiny, home-based businesses started doing launches that sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in sales with their launches.
Launch is the treasure map into that world; an almost secret world of digital entrepreneurs who create cash-on-demand paydays with their product launches and business launches.
Whether you have an existing business, or you have a service-based business and want to develop your own products so you can leverage your time and your impact, or you're still in the planning phase, this is how you start fast. This formula is how you engineer massive success.
Now the question is this : are you going to start slow, and fade away from there? Or are you ready for a launch that will change the future of your business and your life?
Joan Magretta
Competitive advantage. The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter’s frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter’s name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts.Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter’s revolutionary thinking. Written with Porter’s full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this new book delivers fresh, clear examples to illustrate and update Porter’s ideas.Magretta uses her wide business experience to translate Porter’s powerful insights into practice and to correct the most common misconceptions about them—for instance, that competition is about being unique, not being the best; that it is a contest over profits, not a battle between rivals; that strategy is about choosing to make some customers unhappy, not being all things to all customers.An added feature is an original Q&A with Porter himself, which includes answers to managers’ FAQs.Eminently readable, this book will enable every manager in your organization to grasp Porter’s ideas—and swiftly deploy them to drive your company’s success.
Lao Tzu
This translation captures the terse and enigmatic beauty of the ancient original and resists the tendency toward interpretive paraphrase found in many other editions. Along with the complete translation, Lombardo and Addiss provide one or more key lines from the original Chinese for each of the eighty-one sections, together with a transliteration of the Chinese characters and a glossary commenting on the pronunciation and meaning of each Chinese character displayed. This greatly enhances the reader's appreciation of how the Chinese text works and feels and the different ways it can be translated into English.
"This crystalline translation of the Tao Te Ching is accurate down to the nuance and as concisely poetic as the original. It preserves the quirks and flavors of the original text. The translators hearkened to the message of the book itself, and kept it clear and gently strong. Of the many translations I have read in English, this is unquestionably the best." —Gary Snyder, University of California at Davis
"This edition combines an earthy—as opposed to esoteric—translation with a welcome entrée into the Chinese text for those who do not know that language. The gorgeous ink paintings add beauty to the edition. I can't imagine a better way to present this text, and I can't imagine ever using a different edition." —Greg Salyer, Huntingdon College "This is by far the best translation on the market today, and I have been praising it to whoever would listen." —Livia Kohn, Boston University
Michael E. Porter
For the past fifteen years, Michael Porter's work has defined our fundamental understanding of competition and competitive strategy. Presented here for the first time as a collective whole are a dozen articles -- two entirely new pieces together with ten of Porter's articles from the Harvard Business Review, as well as an introduction from Porter, his first statement on how the parts of his work fit together.To read through this collection is to experience Porter at work: we see firsthand as his important theories take shape, deepen, and evolve over time. Porter addresses the important issues of competition, from company strategy to the relationship between competition and environmental regulation to the counterintuitive role of geography in the global economy.
At once eloquent and convincing, these essays help us to examine and understand the essence of competition. "On Competition offers the intellectual foundations for company and country strategies for the years ahead.
Peter Compo
A NEW CLARITY FOR STRATEGY THEORY AND PRACTICE Consultants and academics continue to report chronic failures of strategy practice. Two causes strategy is still not fully defined, and strategy practice is still largely based on a planned versus adaptive view of the world. The Emergent Approach to Strategy digs deep into complex adaptive systems to bring a new clarity to strategy function and incorporate this understanding into practice. The emergent approach practice Go to emergentapproach.com to access the following
Richard Koch
Nearly all of the great success stories of the twentieth century—right up to the present day—are stories of simplifying.
Over the last 40 years Richard Koch has worked to uncover the simple principles and strategies behind every successful business. With the help of venture capitalist Greg Lockwood and supported by research from OC&C Strategy Consultants, Koch has uncovered the one uniting principle behind successful companies such as IKEA, the Boston Consulting Group, Honda, and Uber: Simplify.
Taking the principle one step further, Koch has identified that companies will either be price simplifiers—consider flying a budget airline stripped of all the extras that still takes you from point A to point B—or proposition simplifiers—such as Apple with their easy-to-use products for a large market willing to pay a premium.
In this book, Koch and Lockwood dissect case studies to share the secrets behind the great simplifiers of business. You’ll learn how to:
• Decide which simplifying strategy is the best option for your business
• Model your business as a price or proposition simplifier
• Make your products and services more useful and better looking
• Spike demands and create markets that didn’t exist before
• Redesign your business process and transform your industry in nine steps
• Implement the three fundamental principles to sparking a price revolution
Are you ready to become the next market leader? Start simplifying today.
Richard P. Rumelt
Clears out the mumbo jumbo and muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader, whether the CEO at a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a church pastor, the head of a school, or a government official. Richard Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” He debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.”A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for overcoming—the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect in challenges as varied as putting a man on the moon, fighting a war, launching a new product, responding to changing market dynamics, starting a charter school, or setting up a government program. Rumelt’snine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can be put to work on Monday morning.Surprisingly, a good strategy is often unexpected because most organizations don’t have one. Instead, they have “visions,” mistake financial goals for strategy,and pursue a “dog’s dinner” of conflicting policies and actions.Rumelt argues that the heart of a good strategy is insight—into the true nature of the situation, into the hidden power in a situation, and into an appropriate response. He shows you how insight can be cultivated with a wide variety of tools for guiding yourown thinking.Good Strategy/Bad Strategy uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis.Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.From the Hardcover edition.
Robert S. Kaplan
The creators of the revolutionary performance management tool called the Balanced Scorecard introduce a new approach that makes strategy a continuous process owned not just by top management, but by everyone. In The Strategy-Focused Organization , Robert Kaplan and David Norton share the results of ten years of learning and research into more than 200 companies that have implemented the Balanced Scorecard. Drawing from more than twenty in-depth case studies--including Mobil, CIGNA, and AT&T Canada--Kaplan and Norton illustrate how Balanced Scorecard adopters have taken their groundbreaking tool to the next level. These organizations have used the scorecard to create an entirely new performance management framework that puts strategy at the center of key management processes and systems.
Kaplan and Norton articulate the five key principles required for building strategy-focused organizations: 1) translate the strategy into operational terms, 2) align the organization to the strategy, 3) make strategy everyone's everyday job, 4) make strategy a continual process, and 5) mobilize change through strong, effective leadership. The authors provide a detailed account of how a range of organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors have deployed these principles to achieve breakthrough, sustainable performance improvements.
Robert S. Kaplan
The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton provide the theoretical foundations for the Balanced Scorecard; in the second part, they describe the steps organizations must take to build their own Scorecards; and, finally, they discuss how the Balanced Scorecard can be used as a driver of change.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Foreword by Steven Pinker
Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions.
By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information—unprecedented in history—can tell us a great deal about who we are—the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.
Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?
Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential—revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health—both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
Sun Tzu
Twenty-Five Hundred years ago, Sun Tzu wrote this classic book of military strategy based on Chinese warfare and military thought. Since that time, all levels of military have used the teaching on Sun Tzu to warfare and civilization have adapted these teachings for use in politics, business and everyday life. The Art of War is a book which should be used to gain advantage of opponents in the boardroom and battlefield alike.
Tien Tzuo
Companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Salesforce are just the tip of the iceberg for the subscription model. The real transformation--and the real opportunity--is just beginning.
Subscription companies are growing nine times faster than the S&P 500. Why? Because unlike product companies, subscription companies know their customers. A happy subscriber base is the ultimate economic moat.
Today's consumers prefer the advantages of access over the hassles of maintenance, from transportation (Uber, Surf Air), to clothing (Stitch Fix, Eleven James), to razor blades and makeup (Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox). Companies are similarly demanding easier, long-term solutions, trading their server rooms for cloud storage solutions like Box. Simply put, the world is shifting from products to services.
But how do you turn customers into subscribers? As the CEO of the world's largest subscription management platform, Tien Tzuo has helped hundreds of companies transition from relying on individual sales to building customer-centric, recurring-revenue businesses. His core message in Subscribed is simple: Ready or not, excited or terrified, you need to adapt to the Subscription Economy -- or risk being left behind.
Tzuo shows how to use subscriptions to build lucrative, ongoing one-on-one relationships with your customers. This may require reinventing substantial parts of your company, from your accounting practices to your entire IT architecture, but the payoff can be enormous. Just look at the case studies:
* Adobe transitions from selling enterprise software licenses to offering cloud-based solutions for a flat monthly fee, and quadruples its valuation.
* Fender evolves from selling guitars one at a time to creating lifelong musicians by teaching beginners to play, and keeping them inspired for life.
* Caterpillar uses subscriptions to help solve problems -- it's not about how many tractors you can rent, but how much dirt you need to move.
In Subscribed, you'll learn how these companies made the shift, and how you can transform your own product into a valuable service with a practical, step-by-step framework. Find out how how you can prepare and prosper now, rather than trying to catch up later.
Vaughan Evans
The strategy tools you need for your business to succeed ! Let Key Strategy Tools be your guide to developing a winning strategy for your firm. Cherry-pick the most useful approaches for your business and create a robust strategy that withstands investor scrutiny and becomes your roadmap to success. Covering 88 tools and framed within an innovative strategy development process, the Strategy Pyramid, this user-friendly manual takes you through each step of the process. Whether analysing your market, building competitive advantage or addressing risk and opportunity, you’ll find the strategic thinking tools you need at every stage in your strategy development. Following in the footsteps of the hugely successful Key Management Models and Key Performance Indicators , this book delivers professional-level information in the practical and accessible framework synonymous with the Key series.
W. Chan Kim
In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans"—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.
William Duggan
In Napoleon's Glance William Duggan discovers the secret of Napoleon's success -- coup d'oeil (pronounced koo-DOY) meaning a stroke of the eye, or "glance": a sudden insight that shows you what course of action to take. It comes from knowledge of the You draw on what worked in other situations, in a new combination that fits the problem at hand. Napoleon's Glance -- probably the first book to link Napoleon's victories to Picasso's development as an artist! -- tells how 10 great strategists owed their success to coup d'oeil. All 10 applied it with great effort and risk and no guarantee it would work. But in case after case, we find the same How American women won the vote. How General Patton became the most successful Allied general on the Western Front of World War II. How Joan of Arc saved France from certain conquest by England. How in one generation Japan went from a peasant backwater to an industrial giant. How Picasso became the leading artist of the twentieth century. Though there have been scores of books written about Napoleon, this is the first popular book written for the general reader about his military strategy.
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