Humans have never lived in more content-saturated times. From the moment we wake up, we’re reading. Emails, tweets, app notifications, nutrition facts, news articles, status updates—some of us read thousands of words before 10 a.m.
Everyone at work is busy, and entrepreneurs are the busiest. But amid your crazy schedule packed with meetings and to-do lists, don’t forget to take time for a few books in 2015.
Books are an important element of the entrepreneur’s creative diet. Here’s why:
- Books give you a chance to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, problem-solving from their perspective and becoming more creative in the process.
- You learn a lot more and recall what you’ve learned more effectively when you invest time reading a single deep narrative vs. reading hundreds of small, disconnected thoughts throughout the day.
- It’s easier to read books than ever before. If the old-fashioned, bulky-pages method doesn’t work for you, listen to audio books on your commute, or flip through titles on your mobile device while on a plane.
This list features 10 books that entrepreneurs and small business owners may find especially useful. All were published in 2014. Plenty of older books are still relevant, but this way, the books are more likely to be new to your reading list. I’ve also included a brief overview of each book from its Amazon description.
1. Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton.
“Despite all the coverage of Twitter’s rise, Nick Bilton of The New York Times is the first journalist to tell the full story—a gripping drama of betrayed friendships and highstakes power struggles. The four founders—Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, and Noah Glass—made a dizzyingly fast transition from ordinary engineers to wealthy celebrities. They fought each other bitterly for money, influence, publicity, and control as Twitter grew larger and more powerful. Ultimately they all lost their grip on it. Bilton’s unprecedented access and exhaustive reporting have enabled him to write an intimate portrait of four friends who accidentally changed the world, and what they all learned along the way.”
2. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz.
“Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular Ben’s Blog.”
3. The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization by Jacob Morgan.
“What is work? What is an employee? What is leadership? You may not be asking these questions, but you can be sure that the future employee is. . . . The companies that have a future are the ones that focus on what the future will bring. This book pushes the boundaries of how we think about work and opens our minds to new possibilities and new ways of doing business.”
4. Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation by Larry Downes and Paul Nunes.
“Until recently, hotels, taxi services, doctors, and energy companies had little to fear from the information revolution. Those days are gone forever. . . . Based on extensive research by the Accenture Institute for High Performance and in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, investors, and executives from more than thirty industries, Big Bang Disruption will arm you with strategies and insights to thrive in this brave new world.
5. Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder by Arianna Huffington.
“In this deeply personal book, Arianna talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritizing the demands of a career and raising two daughters—of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her ‘aha moment.’ Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and scientific findings in the fields of psychology, sports, sleep, and physiology that show the profound and transformative effects of meditation, mindfulness, unplugging, and giving, Arianna shows us the way to a revolution in our culture, our thinking, our workplace, and our lives.”
6. Email Marketing Rules: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Best Practices that Power Email Marketing Success by Chad White.
“Email marketing offers unparalleled reach, acceptance, and effectiveness. It’s also a well-established channel with well-defined behaviors and norms. Email Marketing Rules is your guide to understanding the best practices of this complex, often misunderstood channel as you craft the best executions for your brand.”
7. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull.
“Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and ‘Braintrust’ sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, ‘an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.’”
8. The Mobile Mind Shift: Engineer Your Business to Win in the Mobile Moment by Ted Schadler.
“Your customers now turn to their smartphones for everything. . . . This Pavlovian response is the mobile mind shift -- the expectation that I can get what I want, anytime, in my immediate context. Your new battleground for customers is this mobile moment—the instant in which your customer is seeking an answer. If you're there for them, they'll love you; if you're not, you'll lose their business. Both entrepreneurial companies like Dropbox and huge corporations like Nestlé are winning in that mobile moment. Are you?”
9. #GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso.
“Sophia’s never been a typical CEO, or a typical anything, and she’s written #GIRLBOSS for outsiders (and insiders) seeking a unique path to success, even when that path is winding as all hell and lined with naysayers. #GIRLBOSS includes Sophia’s story, yet is infinitely bigger than Sophia. It’s deeply personal yet universal. . . . Success is about trusting your instincts and following your gut, knowing which rules to follow and which to break.”
10. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel.
“Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.”
Honorable Mention: The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries.
This one's an oldie (by Silicon Valley standards, anyway) but goodie — and if you're working at a startup and haven't read it yet, it's time. Ries' take on user-centered business and ongoing innovation is based on real-life experience, and the lessons you'll take away are more than worth the few hours you'll spend reading this page-turner.
Just like a gym or nutrition plan, the best book is the one you’ll actually read and benefit from. If you’ve struggled to learn from business books in the past, make an effort in 2015 to find a more manageable reading method (whether it’s hard copy or iPad) and a few titles you’re actually excited to start perusing.
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