![]() ![]() Carnegie very carefully, with case studies, stresses the importance of having an orientation outside of one’s own self in all aspects of communication. Unless you have such a disruptive and innovative technology that it will succeed regardless of your effectiveness as a leader, most successful businesses are built by people who are excellent at cultivating relationships. This is not necessarily an entrepreneurial book, but it teaches basic philosophies of working with and dealing with people. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. To this day, it’s the single most important book I’ve read specifically on building a business ![]() I like the book because it hit me at exactly the right time. Now obviously he’s a very well-known and successful entrepreneur himself, but that’s not why I like the book. He reduces something complicated (in this case, the essence of a running a business) to its very basic principles, without simplifying to the point of meaninglessness - this is the sign of a fantastic writer. Over the years, there’s so much I borrowed from the book in running Sageworks that it has become hard to discern between his book and my core philosophy of business. The profundity of that never really struck me until later on in my career, and to this day, I happen to think he’s dead on. Paul was the first author I read who roughly indicates that the problem with growing a business isn’t the lack of access to capital, but having and borrowing capital before your business is ready to grow and before you’ve fully developed your business model. Today in the popular press (and even in some political circles), there’s an assumption that to grow a business, you need to get access to capital. This concept has stuck with me over the years.Īnother lesson from Paul stands out in particular: He’s not a big proponent of businesses borrowing money. For example, while he’s not necessarily averse to hyper-growth, he notes that if a business grows too quickly, like a plant, it becomes difficult for it to sustain itself. Paul likens the development of a business to the development of an organism, making the basic tenets of running a business (customer service, revenue growth, etc.) easy to grasp. What I like most about his book, is that he takes a very different tack on growing a business. Even today, I crack open this book when I want to brush up on things I’ve either forgotten or not had the discipline to fully implement. ![]() I read this book in the late 1980s, after graduating from college. You will note that not all of these books are just on entrepreneurship, per se, but nevertheless they have been most helpful to me in building successful businesses. While nothing can substitute for the experience of actually struggling to create, run and grow one’s own business, I genuinely believe that these books have helped me immensely as an entrepreneur. These books have covered many different topics, written mostly by practitioners, but even some academics.īelow I’ve listed the three most powerful books that I’ve read on this subject. As a result, I have read between 200 and 300 books on (or related to) entrepreneurship. Starting from that point, I made entrepreneurship the dominant theme of my professional career. After college and a short experience working at a bank, I felt even more strongly that I wanted to run a business of my own. I had long been infatuated with the idea, having run small door-to-door businesses when I was in middle and high school. When I got out of college I was obsessed (some would say possessed) with developing a successful business. ![]()
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