Here are 100 books that Entrepreneurial You fans have personally recommended if you like
Entrepreneurial You.
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I have for 28 years helped organizations around the world scale their business. I'm a dedicated innovator and thought leader in artificial intelligence and digital commerce. My passion for innovation thrives in exploring how AI can transform businesses and improve lives. I've authored 10 books and shared my insights as a professional speaker to educate, inspire, and motivate others. I love delving into the future of AI and innovation, which drives me to constantly learn and share knowledge. This list reflects the books that have significantly influenced my journey. My life is about pushing forward, always looking for alternatives to understand where those paths might lead us.
I love this book because it ads so much valuable advice to entrepreneurship and innovation. Eric Ries introduces a methodology that emphasizes agility, customer feedback, and iterative design.
This book inspired me to embrace rapid experimentation and learning, which is crucial in the fast-paced world of AI. It taught me the value of pivoting and adapting, helping me guide businesses to success amidst uncertainty.
'The Lean Startup changes everything.' - Harvard Business Review
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Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable.
The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
Essential reading for any ambitious entrepreneur, The Lean Startup will teach you to identify what your customers really want. You'll learn how to test your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late.
With over a million copies sold across the globe, now is your time…
I learned about leadership and building organizations in a volunteer, community-based organization growing up. I ran my first leadership workshop as an 18-year-old for 15-16-year-old kids, and at its peak, led a passionate group of 200+ kids. I then woke up from that dream into a “real job” as a product manager in a company selling products like bath soap and shampoo, and later as a strategy consultant. It was there that I noticed the significant pain people were experiencing in the corporate world, and I realized I could help leaders build organizations where both the business and its people could thrive.
This book by Noam Wasserman brought scientific rigor to the difficult, often painful decisions entrepreneurs face. Wasserman was one of the first to deeply analyze these challenges, and I found his approach innovative.
I was particularly impressed by his creative method of gathering data—founders who were too busy to fill out traditional surveys were drawn in by an executive compensation benchmarking survey, only to find that 90% of the questions fed directly into his research.
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. 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…
I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. In fact, I was happy in corporate life. But when my job in corporate America blew up, I realized that I need to rethink my entire approach to building my career and my life. The result of these efforts is The 10% Entrepreneur. Over the past decade, I have integrated entrepreneurship into my life on a part-time basis, reaping meaningful financial and psychic rewards in the process. In the process, I have taught hundreds of thousands of others that entrepreneurship does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
This is a compelling and fast-paced read about how you can develop a compelling pitch that will convince people to back you. Whether you are looking for investors, customers, business partners, or employees, knowing how to pitch your ideas in a compelling way is absolutely essential. This book dives deep into that challenge with tons of ideas and advice.
'This remarkable book can be your secret weapon for bringing your idea to life.' DAN PINK, bestselling author of Drive
'Whether you want to get ahead inside a company or build a startup from the ground up, this fascinating book is a must-read.' REID HOFFMAN, co-founder of LinkedIn
'A super-readable and actionable look at how to make your ideas take flight. Whether you're pitching a brand new startup or an idea for your company's next product, you'll find a wealth of insights and stories throughout.' MIKE KRIEGER, co-founder of Instagram
I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. In fact, I was happy in corporate life. But when my job in corporate America blew up, I realized that I need to rethink my entire approach to building my career and my life. The result of these efforts is The 10% Entrepreneur. Over the past decade, I have integrated entrepreneurship into my life on a part-time basis, reaping meaningful financial and psychic rewards in the process. In the process, I have taught hundreds of thousands of others that entrepreneurship does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
As a professor at Harvard Business School, Eisenmann has taught a generation of entrepreneurs how to launch and scale businesses. He has then watched as some of these promising businesses fail. This book explores the 6 major patterns of failure in entrepreneurial ventures, shows how they play out in the real world, and gives you the tool to avoid a similar fate.
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail.
“Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way
Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it.
So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the…
Emilie Wapnick is an award-winning author and community builder. She is the founder and creative director at Puttylike, where she helps multipotentialites (people with many passions and creative pursuits) integrate all of their interests to create dynamic, fulfilling, and fruitful careers and lives. Her popular TED talk, Why some of us don’t have one true calling, has been viewed 7 million times and she has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Forbes, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, BBC, and Vice.
Pamela Slim offers a wonderful way to reimagine your life and career, build your personal brand, and share your story. Multipotentialites often struggle to describe where they’ve been and where they’re headed in an impactful way. This book argues that your career is not a linear thing—it’s a collection of different types of work that you’re proud of. Body of Work will help you see your life story from a totally new vantage point.
These days it's increasingly rare to have a stable career in any field. More and more of us are blending big company jobs, startup gigs, freelance work, and volunteer side projects. We take chances to expand our knowledge, capabilities, and experience. But how do we make sense of that kind of career - and explain it? Pamela Slim, the acclaimed author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, gives us the tools to have meaningful careers in this new world of work. She shows how to find the connections among diverse accomplishments, sell your story, and continually reinvent and relaunch your brand.
I am the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. I started out as a macroeconomist but, early on, discovered stats and stocks—which have long been fertile fields for data torturing and data mining. My book, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics is a compilation of a variety of dubious and misleading statistical practices. More recently, I have written several books on AI, which has a long history of overpromising and underdelivering because it is essentially data mining on steroids. No matter how loudly statisticians shout correlation is not causation, some will not hear.
A biting quip in the debate about whether computers are on the verge of surpassing (or have already surpassed) human intelligence is, “It is not that computers are getting smarter but that humans are getting dumber.”
In the same spirit, Nichols argues that “These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything.”
People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything; with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.…
I am a passionate learner; passionate, not for knowledge, but for what Anders Ericsson calls “know-how.” I love to learn how to do things– especially writing craft techniques. These fascinate me because every technique and every skill I practice and master makes me better at the real work of writing: communication. In many of today’s writing workshops, aspiring writers are told to focus on themselves and their feelings. This is idiotic: expert writing is not about you; it’s about making things happen in other people—in their intellects and imaginations, in their hearts, even in their bodies. To make that happen, you need skills, skills anyone can learn through dedicated practice.
The work of Anders Ericsson changed my life. In this book, he describes his research into how certain people become really good at what they do. They all use one particular approach to achieving excellence. First, through a teacher, they learn the specific skills they need for their chosen activity. Then, they devote large amounts of time to practicing each skill to the point of mastery. Finally, with more practice, they learn to put all the skills together.
This way of learning is familiar to anyone who’s played a sport or a musical instrument. But it had never been applied to writing. Inspired by Ericsson’s work, that’s what I did, first with my own writing, then in classes I taught, and finally in my book listed above.
Most athletes are not born with any natural advantage.
Three world-class chess players were sisters, whose success was planned by their parents before they were even born.
Anders Ericsson has spent thirty years studying The Special Ones, the geniuses, sports stars and musical prodigies. And his remarkable finding, revealed in Peak, is that their special abilities are acquired through training. The innate 'gift' of talent is a myth. Exceptional individuals are born with just one unique ability, shared by us all - the ability…
Although I’ve worked in many professions and industries, a common theme in all my jobs is that I love helping people succeed in their careers. I’ve started or sponsored employee networks that focused on professional development, I’m a certified coach that focuses on propelling a client’s career, and I am a conference keynote speaker on the topics of careers and leadership. Everyone deserves to have a great career that makes them want to jump out of bed on Monday morning and that provides a good living and lifestyle. I love to make that happen!
I love this book for its idea and evidence that generalists, and not specialists, are often the most successful.
With examples of how those who cross domains are the most impactful inventors, it gives great hope for those broad thinkers who explore diverse experiences and careers to develop skills. It’s validation for those who haven’t quite figured out what they want to be when they grow up, with the idea that “frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers.”
A must-read for job seekers and for human resources professionals.
'Fascinating . . . If you're a generalist who has ever felt overshadowed by your specialist colleagues, this book is for you' - Bill Gates
The instant Sunday Times Top Ten and New York Times bestseller Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A Financial Times Essential Reads
A powerful argument for how to succeed in any field: develop broad interests and skills while everyone around you is rushing to specialize.
From the '10,000 hours rule' to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many…
I am one of the founders of the American dispute resolution field and have taught negotiation, legal ethics, mediation, alternative dispute resolution and international dispute resolution for 40 years in over 25 countries on every continent. I have mediated, negotiated or arbitrated hundreds of cases. I am a law professor who has taught legal ethics since it was required post-Watergate for all law students. As a negotiation teacher and practitioner, I have seen the effects of deceit and dishonorable negotiations in law and diplomacy and peace seeking and I have also seen what can happen when people treat each other fairly to reach better outcomes for problems than they could achieve on their own.
Drawing on years of business school teaching and research and leading negotiation trainings in many countries, Shell provides an important guide for people to stand up for their values in business, law, and complex work situations. Real-world stories put flesh on the bones of outlines of both philosophical and political approaches to difficult choices in career and workplace negotiations. This book can assist any negotiator in figuring out what is really important to them (and their clients and organizations) and then how to actualize behaviors that make principled change happen. This book also provides great advice about when to walk away from the negotiation table or a particular task or job because higher values call.
The Conscience Code is a practical guide to creating workplaces where everyone can thrive.
Surveys show that more than 40% of employees report seeing ethical misconduct at work, and most fail to report it--killing office morale and allowing the wrong people to set the example. Collegiate professor G. Richard Shell has heard work misconduct stories from his MBA students which inspired him to create this helpful guide for navigating these nuances.
Shell created?this book?to point to a better path: recognize that these conflicts are coming, learn to spot them, then follow a research-based, step-by-step approach for resolving them skillfully.?By committing…
By my 35th birthday, I had founded and sold two multi-million dollar
companies…and proceeded to lose my entire fortune. I started all over again, driven
to find better ways to grow healthy and strong businesses. I've devoted my life
to the research and delivery of innovative, impactful entrepreneurial strategies to
support the sustainability of businesses everywhere. My ultimate goal is to simplify entrepreneurship and help business owners avoid common pitfalls through keynote speaking and business authorship. It's all about serving!
Dorie and I have worked together in the past on webinars, masterminds, and the like, and I always learn something from her professor brain! In Stand Out, the message is that to make a name for yourself, you have to capitalize on your unique perspective and knowledge and inspire others to listen and take action.
But becoming a "thought leader" is a mysterious and opaque process. Where do the ideas come from, and how do they get noticed? Dorie explains how to identify the ideas that set you apart and promote them successfully. The key is to recognize your own value, cultivate your expertise, and put yourself out there.
Standing out is no longer optional. Learn how to become a thought leader - the agenda setter, the go-to person - with Dorie Clark's Stand Out.
Too many people believe that if they keep their heads down and work hard, they'll gain the recognition they deserve. But that's simply not true anymore. To get noticed, create true job security, and make a difference in the world, you have to make sure your ideas get noticed.
Drawing on interviews with thought leaders including Seth Godin, David Allen and Daniel Pink, Dorie Clark shows you how to break through the clamour of…
