Here are 100 books that Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans fans have personally recommended if you like
Entrepreneurship and Self-Help among Black Americans.
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My passion and expertise related to African American business history began years ago when I searched for a Ph.D. dissertation topic. After mulling over a variety of options, I ultimately decided to examine the history of an African American insurance company in my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. While working on this project, I began to formulate ideas for future research in the realm of African American business history. I subsequently developed into one of the acknowledged experts in this field. Based upon my track record, I served as a historical consultant and appeared in the documentary Boss: The Black Experience in Businesswhich premiered on PBS in April 2019.
Despite almost four centuries of black independent self-help enterprises, the agency of African Americans in attempting to forge their own economic liberation through business activities and entrepreneurship has remained noticeably absent from the historical record. Juliet Walker's award-winning ""History of Black Business in America"" is the only source that provides a detailed study of the continuity, diversity, and multiplicity of independent self-help economic activities among African Americans.This new, updated edition divides the original work into two volumes. The first volume covers African American business history through the end of the Civil War and features the first comprehensive account of black…
My passion and expertise related to African American business history began years ago when I searched for a Ph.D. dissertation topic. After mulling over a variety of options, I ultimately decided to examine the history of an African American insurance company in my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. While working on this project, I began to formulate ideas for future research in the realm of African American business history. I subsequently developed into one of the acknowledged experts in this field. Based upon my track record, I served as a historical consultant and appeared in the documentary Boss: The Black Experience in Businesswhich premiered on PBS in April 2019.
This classic work, originally published in 1940, provides a panoramic examination of African American insurance companies (including a detailed overview of individual firms).
Although An Economic Detourfocuses on black insurers, its’ broader analysis encompassed all black-owned enterprises during this period. Specifically, Stuart declared that, under the dictates of Jim Crow racial segregation,African American entrepreneurs were relegated to only serving African American consumers.
This, necessarily, had an inhibiting impact on their profitability. Especially since non-African American entrepreneurs also had access to the African American consumer market.
As someone who has written extensively on black-owned insurance companies, An Economic Detourhas been a long-standing “go-to” resource for me.
My passion and expertise related to African American business history began years ago when I searched for a Ph.D. dissertation topic. After mulling over a variety of options, I ultimately decided to examine the history of an African American insurance company in my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. While working on this project, I began to formulate ideas for future research in the realm of African American business history. I subsequently developed into one of the acknowledged experts in this field. Based upon my track record, I served as a historical consultant and appeared in the documentary Boss: The Black Experience in Businesswhich premiered on PBS in April 2019.
Ivan Light’s Ethnic Enterprise in America utilizes both sociological and historical analysis.
From my perspective, what makes Light’s classic book unique and important is its’ detailed discussion of “rotating credit associations.”
These were/are community-based networks that allow participants to raise capital for a variety of economic projects (such as starting or growing a business).
According to Light, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans regularly (and successfully) used rotating credit associations; African Americans did not (although rotating credit associations were/are a part of African tradition).
Ethnic Enterprise in America plausibly suggests that this form of “cultural amnesia” can be linked to the trauma associated with the enslavement of transplanted Africans in America.
Published over fifty years ago, this book remains useful and informative.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.
My passion and expertise related to African American business history began years ago when I searched for a Ph.D. dissertation topic. After mulling over a variety of options, I ultimately decided to examine the history of an African American insurance company in my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. While working on this project, I began to formulate ideas for future research in the realm of African American business history. I subsequently developed into one of the acknowledged experts in this field. Based upon my track record, I served as a historical consultant and appeared in the documentary Boss: The Black Experience in Businesswhich premiered on PBS in April 2019.
Black Business in the New Southprovides a detailed examination of North Carolina Mutual, the largest African-American-owned insurance company.
Among other things, Weare’s analysis includes a cogent assessment of how black-owned companies, in all industries, compared to their white counterparts. He asserts that African American enterprises, historically, have been economically backward and socially advanced.
Specifically, for a variety of reasons, the profits of black enterprises tend to be smaller than their white counterparts. However, in the realm of corporate social responsibility, black companies have been more community-minded than white companies.
On a personal note, this book served as a template for my first book.
At the turn of the century, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company became the "world's largest Negro business." Located in Durham, North Carolina, which was known as the "Black Wall Street of America," this business came to symbolize the ideas of racial progress, self-help, and solidarity in America. Walter B. Weare's social and intellectual history, originally published in 1973 (University of Illinois Press) and updated here to include a new introduction, still stands as the definitive history of black business in the New South. Drawing on a wide range of sources-including personal papers of the company's leaders and oral…
True confession: I’m not a baker, but I love it when other people bake. It’s riveting to watch how they transform the humblest of ingredients into desserts that are beautiful and delicious. I get super excited to see this creative process unfold, which is why I adore The Great British Baking Show and other competitive reality baking programs. They inspired me to write Marvelous Jackson because my main character desperately wants to snag a coveted audition spot on The Marvelous Midwest Kids Baking Championship. He relishes the frenetic energy and noise of a kitchen packed with ambitious and talented people—just like I do!
Eleven-year-old Ellis is the hapless, harmonica-playing main character of Amos' book. He’s spending summer vacation with his newly divorced dad, who’s laser-focused on his goal of opening a brand-new cookie shop in Hollywood. Ellis gets roped into helping him, and shenanigans ensue, many of them involving chocolate chips, bags of sugar, and industrial-size mixers.
I love that Amos loosely based his debut on his own childhood in the 1970s when he helped his father—Wally “Famous” Amos (perhaps you’ve heard of him?)—open a cookie shop on Sunset Boulevard. Woven throughout Ellis’s story are spunky neighbors, Blues music, Black pride, and lessons celebrating the value of hard work. These components add depth to Amos’s otherwise fizzy story.
WINNER OF THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING LITERARY WORK—YOUTH/TEENS!
It's a summer of family, friendship, and fun fiascos in this acclaimed novel that's as irresistible as a fresh-baked cookie.
Ellis Bailey Johnson has the summertime blues. Instead of hanging out with friends, listening to music, and playing his harmonica, Ellis has to help bring his dad’s latest farfetched, sure-to-fail idea to life: open the world’s first chocolate chip cookie store.
They have six weeks to perfect their recipe, get a run-down A-frame storefront on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard into tip-top shape, and bring in customers. But nothing goes according to…
I know it's kind of weird, but I have been fascinated by the world of direct-response marketing ever since I first saw the full-page ads in the "newspapers" my grandmother loved to read (The National Inquirer and the Weekly World News). Those ads fascinated me because, at first, I thought they were stories in the newspaper. That was my first exposure to the work of the brilliant Eugene Schwartz. I used to check our mail so I could grab all the "junk mail" that everyone else threw away because that's the only mail I wanted to read. That's why I became a direct-response copywriter.
If ever I have read a book that made a bold promise on the cover and then fully delivered on that promise in the pages of the book itself, it's this one. Reading this book (more than once) has literally helped me outthink, outperform, and outearn my competition.
Jay Abraham is truly the "guru to the gurus" in business growth. I found this book to be the best distillation of Jay's teachings I have ever encountered. It’s been worth more than 100 times the $30 I paid for it.
A trusted advisor to America's top corporations and recognized as one of today's preeminent marketing experts, Jay Abraham has created a program of proven strategies to help you realize undreamed-of success!
Unseen opportunities face each of us every day. Using clear examples from his own experience, Jay explains just how easy it can be to find and/or create new opportunities for wealth-building in any existing business, enterprise, or venture.
And just how easy can it be? One entrepreneur took the concept of the ballpoint pen and refined it into a multimillion-dollar idea: roll-on deodorant. Fred Smith of Federal Express took…
I’m a U.S. Air Force Fighter pilot who has dedicated my life to the subject of decision-making. When flying, my job is to make thousands of decisions on each flight, often with limited information and lives on the line. My calling now is to share the lessons that I’ve learned with the world to allow them to make better, quicker decisions, and to have more confidence in their thinking.
I enjoyed this book because it helped me to understand why bold ideas often don't get off the ground in big organizations.
These ideas are usually sought after and destroyed by the organization itself because the incentives of the managers who approve the ideas aren’t aligned. However, there is a solution that Safi goes into in depth.
A must-read for people who want to change the world.
What do James Bond and Lipitor have in common? Why do traffic jams appear out of nowhere on highways? What can we learn about innovation from a glass of water? In Loonshots, physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behaviour and the challenges of nurturing radical breakthroughs.
Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Oceans of print…
The truth is, I’ve never fit in. I'm always asking questions like: Why do we do it that way? And, what if we tried this instead? These types of questions, however, though intriguing to me and other creatives, make the keepers of the status quo really nervous. As a professor and narrative inquiry researcher, I study the stories of people who've been silenced—extracting the characters, plot, and setting these narratives have in common. For workplace abuse survivors, a salient theme is they think big! To support this mission, I'm on the Executive Board and serve as the Education Director for the National Workplace Bullying Coalition and am a regular contributor to Psychology Today.
It was my research on creativity that led me to study workplace abuse.
Surprisingly, there are remarkable similarities among targets of bullying; most salient, they tend to shake the status quo at work while exploring and offering novel solutions to institutionalized problems. Unfortunately, as Grant details in his research, instead of embracing these innovators as forecasters of the future, organizations attempt to silence and minimize their contributions.
However, creatives are not in it for the money or accolades, but for the love of the game and dedication to the mission, thus when they are forced to bow to tradition and play smaller than who they were born to be, they exit the stifling work environment, thus further stagnating an already lagging work culture.
In this book, Grant brilliantly hails the power of the creative to both change our minds and change the world, urging institutions to give them space to…
The #1 New York Times bestseller that examines how people can champion new ideas in their careers and everyday life-and how leaders can fight groupthink, from the author of Think Again and co-author of Option B
"Filled with fresh insights on a broad array of topics that are important to our personal and professional lives."-The New York Times DealBook
"Originals is one of the most important and captivating books I have ever read, full of surprising and powerful ideas. It will not only change the way you see the world; it might just change the way you live your life.…
I’m a writer who is drawn to entrepreneurs, especially those with creative businesses; they inspire me. I launched a freelance writing business in 2014, but I’ve always wanted to work for a magazine. One day, it finally occurred to me to combine my interests and start a magazine about creative entrepreneurs! I have interviewed over 100 creative entrepreneurs for my magazine. I created this list because I think it can help others interested in starting a creative business.
Writing a business plan is a daunting task, no matter if you’re left or right-brain dominant. I needed a tool to kickstart the process.
Since I’m in a creative field, I decided to check out this book. I liked how the exercises in this book made writing a business plan more interesting and, dare I say, fun. The book helped me uncover my unique strengths, and I drew from them to write my business plan.
Do you dream of making a living doing what you love but find the process of creating a viable business plan like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? Jennifer Lee knows what it’s like to make the entrepreneurial leap and how to do it successfully. The key is using, rather than stifling, imagination and intuition. Lee’s illustrated, colorful worksheets and step-by-step instructions are playful yet practical, transforming drudgery into joy. They’ll enable you to define your vision and nail down plans for funding, marketing, networking, and long-term strategy.
The future is the one thing in which we are all invested. In order to shape the future we must be able to visualise possibilities, prepare for consequences, and take action. My job is to help companies, charities, and governments to see and prepare for the future. But so many of the lessons that I find myself trying to teach to leaders have their parallels in our personal and working lives - including mine. In a time of great uncertainty about the future, we all must take time out to picture where we’re going, make choices about our direction, and invest in ourselves to achieve our dreams.
**WINNER OF THE STARTUP INSPIRATION CATEGORY OF THE 2020 BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS**
'It's impossible to read this book without being inspired and energised ... Essential reading for any start-up or entrepreneur, at any stage of the journey.' - Alison Jones, Host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast and author of This Book Means Business
'Genuinely fresh and jargon-free' - Financial Times
How to Have a Happy Hustle shares the secrets of innovation experts and startup founders to help you make your ideas happen.
If you're looking for fulfilment outside the day job, have an idea but don't know where…
