Best business books for inspiration

I have written business plans every year for fun and executed a few. These books inspire different aspects of running a company or starting a new one.

First epiphany business book is E-Myth: Revisited by Gerber. This book exposes the myth of "I started a business so I'm an entrepreneur!" It follows the pie maker starting a pie shop and making pies. Nope not an entrepreneur, they are a technician making pies. So they write down routines on making pies consistently so they can hire people to follow the procedures in making pies. Now they are entrepreneur? Nope. Now they are manager making sure the technicians are following the routines and tweaking the routines were needed for clarity or new improvement. So they write routines for managers so they can hire managers to manage the technicians. Eventually you have a self running company, based on repeatable routines and you can then focus on the business instead of working in the business.

This book's lesson is so applicable to every business. We took it to software development as a consulting firm and got all the roles team members play and the routines to execute them so there was no more tribal knowledge and you had a working base for retrospectives and putting those improvements back in the routines. Release manager out on vacation? No problem. Someone could follow those routines and release software to production with proper security access.

We presented our process to the first ever Agile Software Developer conference and got great reception. Years later, I was asked to review presentation slides for someone that was going to present at another Agile Software Developer conference. I was so impressed with their slides I had to ask where did he learn how to make presentations. He said, Presenting To Win: The Art of Telling Your Story by Weissman

Presenting To Win is an excellent book and can be applied to more then just presentation slides. We have all endured terrible presentations with big data dumps and so much information on a slide that it is in 5 point font to fit it all. Presenting To Win has you focus on the the listener. The key takeaway is simplicity in communication and each slide or point focus on what is in it for the listener. You don't need to do the data dump to back up what you are saying on the slide. Instead, have the slide state why the listener should be listening to you because what is on that slide is important to them. To me this can go beyond just presentation but any communication should focus on the recipient and what is in it for them.

Product managers and people wanting to start a business should read Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking by Hurson The book focuses on problem solving but 85% of the book is how to ask the right question to solve. It has techniques that help shape the problem so you can produce a better solution. I find this book can go hand in hand with the marketing aspects of a product with the book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business to be Remarkable by Godin Purple Cow is all about making your product stand out from others. Anyone involved in marketing should read this as well as product manager.