Entrepreneurship: Books

Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back. Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn’t depend on shelving what you currently do. You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful.

What does it take to turn ideas into action? What are the elements of a perfect pitch? How do you win the war for talent? How do you establish a brand without bucks? These are some of the issues everyone faces when starting or revitalizing any undertaking, and Guy Kawasaki, former marketing maven of Apple Computer, provides the answers.

The Art of the Start will give you the essential steps to launch great products, services, and companies—whether you are dreaming of starting the next Microsoft or a not-for-profit that’s going to change the world. It also shows managers how to unleash entrepreneurial thinking at established companies, helping them foster the pluck and creativity that their businesses need to stay ahead of the pack. Kawasaki provides readers with GIST—Great Ideas for Starting Things—including his field-tested insider’s techniques for bootstrapping, branding, networking, recruiting, pitching, rainmaking, and, most important in this fickle consumer climate, building buzz.

Carrie Wilkerson offers the opportunity to live life on your terms. Want to start your workday with e-mail and coffee on the back patio? Want the flexibility of joining your fourth grader on an all-day field trip? Are you ready to take that vacation you've been planning for years? Then you have a choice to make, and The Barefoot Executive will help jump-start your transition. You'll learn:

Your "why." The most important question. Why do you want to work for yourself?
What type of business best suits your experience and talents.
How to stay focused on your goal and avoid distractions.
Where to find the support that will accelerate your success.
How to link your business to the right market.
Whether it's a service, a product, or your insight or expertise, you already have the raw materials necessary to transform your life. Carrie will walk you through the process of building the business you need to achieve the life you want. Her guidance is practical. No philosophical silliness, no theoretical abstractions- just concrete action steps alongside insights from fellow entrepreneurs, interactive exercises, and links to Carrie's online video coaching segments. It's the next best thing to working one-on-one with her. The Barefoot Executive will have you energized by the possibilities and embracing the extraordinary life that is well within your reach.

DISCOVER what you already have to offer, how to use it to your advantage, and where to find the people who are eager to buy it. The Barefoot Executive will pull you over the hurdle of uncertainty and get you moving, planning, doing.

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.
Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

The global bestseller Business Model Generation introduced a unique visual way to summarize and creatively brainstorm any business or product idea on a single sheet of paper. Business Model You uses the same powerful one-page tool to teach readers how to draw "personal business models," which reveal new ways their skills can be adapted to the changing needs of the marketplace to reveal new, more satisfying, career and life possibilities. Produced by the same team that created Business Model Generation, this book is based on the Business Model Canvas methodology, which has quickly emerged as the world's leading business model description and innovation technique.

When he was sixteen years old, Larry Miller came home one summer night to find all his possessions sitting in three bags on the porch of his darkened house. The door was locked. From those troubled and humble beginnings rose a man whose influence has touched, according to reliable pollsters, more than 99 percent of the population of Utah as well as myriads of people worldwide. Seven months before Miller passed away, he began working with Doug Robinson on this biography. Written in first person, the book talks about the many facets of Larrys life and legacy and speaks candidly about the people and experiences that influenced him. It doesn t just tell Larry Millers story, it shares lessons painful as well as joyful lessons he has learned from his experiences. This fascinating and inspiring biography includes: a moving foreword by Utah Jazz great John Stockton, an epilogue written by Gail Miller, Larry's wife, numerous photographs, a firsthand look at the incredible breadth of Larry Miller's work and contributions in business, in sports, in the arts, in his support of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, as well as his personal humanitarian service, and a full section addressing the question Larry was most often asked: How did you do it?

In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update. And when done right, it's more powerful than traditional persuasion, influence, or marketing techniques.

Kawasaki argues that in business and personal interactions, your goal is not merely to get what you want but to bring about a voluntary, enduring, and delightful change in other people. By enlisting their own goals and desires, by being likable and trustworthy, and by framing a cause that others can embrace, you can change hearts, minds, and actions.

Women-run companies are more likely to stay in business than the average U.S. firm, to grow at three times the average rate, create jobs at twice the average rate and produce profits faster, according to former CEO and BBC producer Heffernan. To find out how and why, she interviewed hundreds of women business owners. Although the way her results confirmed stereotypes about gender differences made her queasy, it turned out that women business owners typically possess the characteristics experts think are needed in 21st-century businesses: combining "discipline, focus, detachment, and systematic thinking with playfulness, empathy, and design." She found that many women started their own businesses after working for corporations that didn't respect or listen to them. In charge of their own companies, their abilities to assert their values, nurture their employees and customers, "orchestrate" rather than "command and control," emphasize collaboration rather than competition, stay open to change, ask for help, learn from mistakes and make time for family became a formula for success. Heffernan's tone matches the frenetic pace and idealistic underpinnings of her interviewees' packed lives. Although aspiring entrepreneurs may wish for more specific details, this book inspires hope for a holistic alternative to the profits-only mentality

Using the latest research and information on entrepreneurial marketing, including consumer behavior, social media, and intellectual property, this book provides practical insights, strategies, and tips on how to apply entrepreneurial marketing concepts to increase the chances of venture success. Business expert and influential author Frederick G. Crane focuses on how to use marketing to find, evaluate, and exploit the right venture opportunity.

Why do most new businesses fail, yet a few entrepreneurs have a habit of winning over and over again? The shocking discovery of years of research and trial is that most startups fail by doing the “right things,” but doing them out of order. In other words, human nature combined with our entrepreneurial drive puts us on autopilot to become part of the 70% to 90% of ventures that fail. From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the Nail It Then Scale It method is based on pattern recognition of the timeless principles and key practices used by successful entrepreneurs to repeatedly innovate. These processes and principles have now been distilled into a handbook to guide entrepreneurs and innovative product managers to victory. Stop following conventional wisdom and join the few entrepreneurs that can consistently take their innovative idea all the way to a successful company launch.