Book picks similar to
Researching Business and Management by Harvey Maylor
innovation
management
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The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup
Noam Wasserman - 2011
Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders.People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.
The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife
Marc Freedman - 2011
The whole 60- to 80-year-old period is simply new territory, he writes, and the people in this period constitute a whole new phenomenon in the 21st century.The Big Shiftis animated by a simple premise: that the challenge of transitioning to and making the most of this new stage—while deeply personal—is much more than an individual problem; it’s an urgent social imperative, one affecting all generations. By embracing this time as a unique period of life – and providing guidance, training, education and support to the millions who are in it – Freedman says that we can make a monument out of what so many think of as the leftover years. The result could be a windfall of talent that will carry us toward a new generation of solutions for growing problems in areas like education, the environment, and health care.
Rise of the Youpreneur: The Definitive Guide to Becoming the Go-To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Future-Proof Business
Chris C. Ducker - 2018
Since then, the Youpreneur has risen to the top across sectors. A Youpreneur transcends the old rules of business and builds a sustainable business from the foundation of their experience, interests, and personality—their personal brand. Youpreneurs draw an engaged, loyal audience even as they pursue varying, changing interests. They play by their own rules, and they reap the benefits. Ready to pivot for the last time, guarantee the success of your business, and become the go-to leader in your industry? Chris Ducker will show you how to develop the Business of You and build a future-proof business model. * * * Chris Ducker is the bestselling author of Virtual Freedom and founder of Youpreneur.com—the entrepreneurial mastermind community that helps experts become the go-to leader in their market. A true entrepreneur at heart, he has built several businesses since venturing into the world of entrepreneurship in 2004, which today collectively house over 450 full-time employees and generate a multi-seven-figure annual revenue. A highly sought-after keynote speaker, trusted international business mentor, blogger, and podcaster, Chris is featured regularly in Entrepreneur, Inc., Success, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and several other key media outlets. Relishing the opportunity to help build strategies for other passionate entrepreneurs that want to grow their businesses in productive and effective ways, Chris hosts several live events each year, including the annual Youpreneur Summit in London. Chris recently relocated back to the UK after many years based in the Philippines, and now lives with his wife and four children in Cambridgeshire. You can reach out to him directly on Twitter @ChrisDucker, or visit his personal website at ChrisDucker.com. * * * Advance praise for Rise of the Youpreneur: “In six years, I’ve built an eight-figure, personal brand business. If I had read Rise of the Youpreneur before I started I could have done it in half the time.” —Michael Hyatt, New York Times bestselling author of Your Best Year Ever “Timely, relevant, and powerful . . . Recommended!” —Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert and author of Hug Your Haters “I’ll be recommending this resource to my community many times over.” —Amy Schmittauer Landino, Founder of Savvy Sexy Social and bestselling author of Vlog Like a Boss “The ultimate guide for personal business success.” —Pat Flynn, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Will It Fly?
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers
John Kay - 2020
The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless.The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.
The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done
Stephen Denning - 2018
Companies that embrace Agile Management learn to connect everyone and everything . . . all the time. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale.Agile began emerging many decades ago, but truly took off in the software development industry. Sparking dramatic improvements in quality, innovation, and speed-to-market, the Agile movement is now spreading quickly throughout all kinds of companies. It enables a team, a unit, or an enterprise to nimbly adapt and upgrade products and services to meet rapidly changing technology and customer needs. And the process is applicable anywhere — companies don’t need to be born Agile, like Spotify. Even centuries-old Barclays is making the transition and reaping rewards.Filled with examples from every sector, The Age of Agile helps readers:Master the three laws of Agile Management (team, customer, network) ● Embrace the new mindset ● Overcome constraints ● Employ meaningful metrics ● Make the entire organization Agile ● And moreWith this breakthrough approach, even global giants can learn to act entrepreneurially. Their future depends on it.
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
Rob Fitzpatrick - 2013
They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.
Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos - 2020
Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.Written in a direct, down-to-earth style, Invent and Wander offers readers a master class in business values, strategy, and execution:● The importance of a Day 1 mindset● Why “it’s all about the long term”● What it really means to be customer obsessed● How to start new businesses and create significant organic growth in an already successful company● Why culture is an imperative● How a willingness to fail is closely connected to innovation● What the Covid-19 pandemic has taught usEach insight offers new ways of thinking through today’s challenges—and more importantly, tomorrow’s—and the never-ending urgency of striving ahead, never resting on one’s laurels. Everyone from CEOs to entrepreneurs just setting up shop to the millions who use Amazon’s products and services in their homes or businesses will come to understand the principles that have driven the success of one of the most important innovators of our time.
Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
David S. Evans - 2016
Economists call matchmakers multisided platforms because they provide physical or virtual platforms for multiple groups to get together. Dating sites connect people with potential matches, for example, and ride-sharing apps do the same for drivers and riders. Although matchmakers have been around for millennia, they’re becoming more and more popular—and profitable—due to dramatic advances in technology, and a lot of companies that have managed to crack the code of this business model have become today’s power brokers.Don’t let the flashy successes fool you, though. Starting a matchmaker is one of the toughest business challenges, and almost everyone who tries to build one, fails.In Matchmakers, David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, two economists who were among the first to analyze multisided platforms and discover their principles, and who’ve consulted for some of the most successful platform businesses in the world, explain how matchmakers work best in practice, why they do what they do, and how entrepreneurs can improve their chances for success.Whether you’re an entrepreneur, an investor, a consumer, or an executive, your future will involve more and more multisided platforms, and Matchmakers—rich with stories from platform winners and losers—is the one book you’ll need in order to navigate this appealing but confusing world.
The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company
Michael S. Malone - 2014
The legendary inventors of the microprocessor-the single most important product in the modern world-Intel today builds the tiny “engines” that power almost every intelligent electronic device on the planet.But the true story of Intel is the human story of the trio of geniuses behind it. Michael S. Malone reveals how each brought different things to Intel, and at different times. Noyce, the most respected high tech figure of his generation, brought credibility (and money) to the company’s founding; Moore made Intel the world’s technological leader; and Grove, has relentlessly driven the company to ever-higher levels of success and competitiveness. Without any one of these figures, Intel would never have achieved its historic success; with them, Intel made possible the personal computer, Internet, telecommunications, and the personal electronics revolutions.The Intel Trinity is not just the story of Intel’s legendary past; it also offers an analysis of the formidable challenges that lie ahead as the company struggles to maintain its dominance, its culture, and its legacy.With eight pages of black-and-white photos.