Category — Small Business

Steven K. Gold

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
Entrepreneur’s Notebook propels you on a whirlwind tour of the start-up process. It is an invaluable reference for new and experienced entrepreneurs that includes chapters on a wide range of topics, from entrepreneurial team building to business plans to financing. This excellent book provides an incredible amount of practical information that will help you make smarter decisions and avoid costly mistakes. The author, Steven K. Gold, is an accomplished entrepreneur who has co-founded and led five early-stage ventures. As an investor and mentor, he also advises many entrepreneurs and young companies. He earned his B.S.E. in Entrepreneurial Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and his M.D. from Brown University Medical School.

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Michele Moreno

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

Guy Kawasaki, CEO of garage.com and former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, Inc., presents his manifesto for world-changing innovation, using his battle-tested lessons to help revolutionaries become visionaries.

* Create Like a God *

Turn conventional wisdom on its head-create revolutionary products and services by analyzing how to approach the problems at hand.

* Command Like a King *

Take charge and make tough, insightful, and strategic decisions-break down the barriers that prevent product adoption and avoid “death magnets” (the stupid mistakes just about everyone makes).

* Work Like a Slave *

Get ready for hard work, and lots of it. To go from revolutionary to visionary, you’ll need to eat like a bird-relentlessly absorbing knowledge about your industry, customers, and competition–and poop like an elephant–spreading the large amount of information and knowledge that you’ve gained.

Filled with insights from top innovators such as Amazon.com, Dell, Hallmark, and Gillette and rich with hands-on experience from the front lines of business, Rules for Revolutionaries will empower you–whether you’re an entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, manager, or small business owner–to turn your dreams into reality, your reality into products, and your products into customer magnets.

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Jessica Livingston

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:

“All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever.” —Steve Wozniak, Apple

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it’s done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businessesdo—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

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Dan S. Kennedy

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
an amazon reviewer says:

Do you want to be successful? Read this book.

I recommend this book to business owners that don’t want to learn from the School of Hard Knocks, (which may be too late) but want to stimulate their minds and actually figure out what opportunities would sell their products.

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Michael E. Gerber

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
SpringQ.com says: Get a hold of your inner entrepreneur, technician and manager and make your biz work!

amazon.com editorial review:

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.

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Guy Kawasaki

Our Rating:

Thoughts/Words/Reviews:
SpringQ.com Says: Guy Kawasaki’s great book on starting anything … but particularly a business. This book is worth the money for Chapter 11 alone: “The Art of Being a Mensch”

Amazon.com Editorial Comments:
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.

At Apple, Kawasaki helped turn ordinary customers into fanatics. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, he has tested his iconoclastic ideas on real- world start- ups. And as an irrepressible columnist for Forbes, he has honed his best thinking about The Art of the Start.

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