Here are 100 books that The Hard Thing About Hard Things fans have personally recommended if you like
The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
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I lived and worked in South Korea for four years, where I first became fascinated with the country’s history, from shamans on Jeju island to the twentieth-century politics of Seoul. I’m the author of two novels and dozens of short stories and essays published in venues around the world, many of which feature some element of Korean history. I’m originally from Canada and now teach creative writing at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
What I appreciate most about David Mitchell’s novel is how he grounds the history in scenes full of well-developed characters. So, for example, we don’t begin the novel with a long note about the historical period or the lineage of the ruling class, but rather with the urgency of childbirth gone wrong in the house of a concubine in Nagasaki in 1799.
It’s from this rootedness in the sense-based that we move into a wider exploration of both geopolitics and the magical, which I absolutely fell in love with—this sense that there is an element of the supernatural at play in this otherwise very realistic historical world.
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller, from the author of CLOUD ATLAS and THE BONE CLOCKS.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010
'Brilliant' - The Times 'A masterpiece' - Scotsman
Be transported to a place like no other: a tiny, man-made island in the bay of Nagasaki, for two hundred years the sole gateway between Japan and the West. Here, in the dying days of the 18th-century, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his fortune. Instead he loses his heart.
Step onto the streets of Dejima and mingle with scheming traders, spies, interpreters, servants and concubines as two…
I have been a founder, CEO, venture capitalist, buyout specialist, Chairman, author, consultant, and coach. I’ve seen the startup world from every angle and also seen how destructive it can be if we don’t take care of our inner lives. My work now is to help people understand how we can transform ourselves to transform our businesses. These books were helpful to me when I needed them most and shaped not only my leadership approach but also my life.
If there’s one thing I needed more of as a founder CEO (and didn’t know I needed), it was self-compassion. Tara’s amazing book is a calming, kind, and loving “friend” of a book that helps you connect with what matters and how our minds can get in our way.
To get in the best “athletic shape” as a leader, we need self-compassion lest we burn ourselves and our teams out and kill our companies in the process. This book was better than any medication I could have taken to calm my nervous system and make me a better leader.
For many of us, feelings of deficiency are right around the corner. It doesn’t take much--just hearing of someone else’s accomplishments, being criticized, getting into an argument, making a mistake at work--to make us feel that we are not okay. Beginning to understand how our lives have become ensnared in this trance of unworthiness is our first step toward reconnecting with who we really are and what it means to live fully. —from Radical Acceptance
“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering…
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.
Yuval Noah Harari connects the dots between our past and the future, providing insights into how we've shaped and been shaped by innovation.
This book inspired me to think about the broader implications of AI and technology on our species. It fuels my passion for leveraging innovation to make a positive impact on society.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
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 have devoted my career to helping leaders navigate challenging transitions into new roles, build their teams, and transform their organizations. Strategic thinking is a key foundation of my work as an executive coach and advisor at Genesis Advisers and a professor at the IMD Business School. Whether executives are taking new roles or driving large-scale transformations, they must be able to rapidly analyze the context, craft good visions and strategies, and mobilize people to realize them. I try to equip the leaders I work with with the mental frameworks, tools, and skillsets to adapt and succeed in the first 90 days and beyond.
I liked that this book highlighted how supposedly tried-and-true approaches to innovation fail to deliver results.
The book’s insights about how to drive radical innovation informed the advice I now give executives about how to approach organizational transformation, starting with an ambitious vision, communicating the “why,” and enlisting great people to go on the journey with them.
It helped me to understand that building organizations to develop disruptive technologies requires leaders to envision things that may sound crazy until they are realized.
What Valuable Company Is Nobody Building? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. "Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how". (Elon…
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even…
I have been a founder, CEO, venture capitalist, buyout specialist, Chairman, author, consultant, and coach. I’ve seen the startup world from every angle and also seen how destructive it can be if we don’t take care of our inner lives. My work now is to help people understand how we can transform ourselves to transform our businesses. These books were helpful to me when I needed them most and shaped not only my leadership approach but also my life.
This book came out when I was a struggling founder CEO and hit me in the right way. Steve is clearly a polarizing leader, and for good reason. He’s complex and deeply flawed, but he also created magic products that changed the world. As a founder, you must constantly step back and question your motivations, as they will subconsciously drive your decisions in ways you don’t always consider.
For me, this was a call to action to understand what it takes to inspire teams to greatness, but it was also a warning to approach it from the right source of inspiration.
From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs' professional and personal life.
Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs' family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.
I’ve experienced good organisations and less so in my working life. Likewise, I've experienced the good and less so of leadership. In leading teams and organisations during my career, I, too, have been an example of both, so I’m passionate about helping leaders grow their capability to ‘avoid the less so’ and lead well, with humanity and greater consciousness, to create workplaces where people flourish and organisations that contribute positively to the future of our world.
In my view, this book is a game-changer. Sinek probably agrees, given that it became a bestseller and has seen him become one of the most influential thinkers on leadership of our time. The Golden Circle—Why, How, What—at the heart of the book flips conventional leadership thinking on its head, getting clear on purpose (the why) rather than starting with the what.
I love the way Sinek brings his thinking and the power of purpose to life with real-world examples, from the Wright brothers, the ‘founders of powered flight,’ through Martin Luther King Jr. to Jobs and Apple.
I am a business and technology journalist with a particular interest in mobility startups. I penned my book after purchasing an EV from startup Better Place, only to discover the company was nearly bankrupt. How did I miss that? I’m supposed to be able to do due diligence! I started writing about cars as a reporter for the Advanced Interactive Media Group. I’m a regular contributor to The Jerusalem Post and Israel21c and have also ghostwritten four business books. Before I wrote about tech, I was starting companies: My own Internet publishing startup, Neta4, raised $3.2 million in 1998. I received my B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College.
Uri Levine founded Waze, the GPS traffic navigation service, which he subsequently sold to Google for over $1 billion. He went on to launch Moovit (“Waze for public transportation”), which was sold to Intel—also for over $1 billion. He’s now founded a dozen companies.
I found Uri’s recommendations about how to be a better entrepreneur to be highly relevant. I wish I’d been able to read this book when I was CEO of my own startup!
Unicorns—companies that reach a valuation of more than $1 billion—are rare. Uri Levine has built two.
And in Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, he shows you just how he did it.
As the cofounder of Waze—the world’s leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date, and which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion—Levine is committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking so that other founders, managers, and employees in the tech space can build their own highly valued companies.
Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and…
This manual addresses the need to ensure that people are at the centre of the organisation. There has never been a timelier reminder of the need to ensure that leading, supporting and developing staff are critical aspects of creating the right organisational culture to grow and develop. Written with sensitivity,…
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 resonated with me because of its brilliantly simple yet profound idea: care personally and challenge directly. This approach cuts through the surprisingly indirect and impersonal culture often found in Silicon Valley, despite what the media publicizes.
I also loved the many stories involving tech heavyweights Kim had worked with, which added a layer of real-world insight and credibility to her advice. The book made me rethink how authentic communication can transform relationships and drive success in any team.
Featuring a new preface, afterword and Radically Candid Performance Review Bonus Chapter, the fully revised & updated edition of Radical Candor is packed with even more guidance to help you improve your relationships at work.
'Reading Radical Candor will help you build, lead, and inspire teams to do the best work of their lives.' - Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In.
If you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all . . . right?
While this advice may work for home life, as Kim Scott has seen first hand, it is a disaster when adopted…
