Books

Note: The book "descriptions" are taken from reviews on Amazon.

• The One Page Business Plan (Horan, Peters): The One Page Business Plan is an easy-to-use process that helps you capture your vision and translate it into concrete results. ... not only removes the mystique from business plans, but also leads you by the hand through crafting the best plan possible: clear, focused, understandable and concise. I consider the book to be a significant contribution to business literature.
• Bankable Business Plans (Rogoff, Bezos): . . . a no-nonsense approach to putting in writing what lenders and investors demand to see. [This book] tells entrepreneurs exactly how to pull together what they need before they see the people with the money.
• Crossing the Chasm (Moore): Moore makes the case that high-tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. His chasm theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. This pattern, says Moore, is unique to the high-tech industry. Moore suggests remedies for the problem that can help businesses meet their long-term goals.
• Design Rules: The Power of Modularity (Baldwin, Clark): Elegant Integration of Real Options and Complexity Thinking ... The authors clearly and persuasively explain how modular design adds a tremendous amount of value through the creation of real options. Furthermore, modularity allows for the evolution of both design and industry.
• High Tech Start Up (Nesheim): You've got a hot idea for a new dot-com, and you're itching to join the folks who regularly show up on CNBC and at the Lexus dealerships in Silicon Valley. But you also know your odds of big-time success are about as long as Bill Gates's position in MSFT. What do you do? John Nesheim lays out the step-by-step skinny in High Tech Startup.
• The Black Swan (Taleb): ... an entertaining and enlightening book ... the message: the world is governed not by the predictable and the average, but by the random, the unknownable, the unpredictable -- big events or discoveries or unusual people that have big consequences. Change comes not uniformly but in unpredictable spurts. These are the Black Swans of the title: completedly unexpected and rare events or novel ideas or technologies that have a huge impact on the world. Indeed, Taleb argues that history itself is primarly driven by these Black Swans.
• Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim, Mauborgne): blue ocean metaphor elegantly summarizes their vision of the kind of expanding, competitor-free markets that innovative companies can navigate. Unlike "red oceans," which are well explored and crowded with competitors, "blue oceans" represent "untapped market space" and the "opportunity for highly profitable growth." The only reason more big companies don't set sail for them, they suggest, is that "the dominant focus of strategy work over the past twenty-five years has been on competition-based red ocean strategies"-i.e., finding new ways to cut costs and grow revenue by taking away market share from the competition. ...
• The Innovator's Solution (Christensen, Raynor): ... analyzes the strategies that allow corporations to successfully grow new businesses and outpace the other players in the marketplace. Christensen's earlier book examined how focusing on profits can destroy even well-run corporations, while this book focuses on companies expanding by being "disruptors" who are able to outpace their entrenched competition.
• The Art of the Start (Kawasaki): 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
• Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Friedman): Friedman's bestseller "The World Is Flat" has helped millions of readers see the world in a new way. In this new book, Friedman takes a fresh and provocative look at two of the biggest challenges we face today: America's surprising loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11; and the global environmental crisis, which is affecting everything from food to fuel to forests. ... he shows us how the solutions to these two big problems are linked--how we can restore the world and revive America at the same time.