

Ask HN: Your top business book recommendations? - icey

What book (or resource) has been the single most influential on your business?
======
hga
_The Innovator's Dilemma_ by Clayton M. Christensen
([http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-
Busin...](http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business-
Essentials/dp/0060521996/))

------
mahipal
I've started reading _The E-Myth Revisited_ ([http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-
Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...](http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-
Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280/)). Someone recommended it pretty highly
on one of the previous HN book threads.

I wish I'd read it two start-ups ago. It's downright scary how well he
describes the _exact_ path my companies took.

~~~
hga
I believe that was me, although I wasn't sure how generally useful it would be
for technology startups (the biggest lesson in the first edition was to build
your business like you were going to franchise it; you can't really reduce
software development into a franchise plan).

What sort of companies were/are your startups?

~~~
mahipal
They were mobile software start-ups, and certainly there were plenty of other
reasons that I left them behind.

But the pattern he describes maps pretty well to my companies. As a
Technician, I started a company focused around building what I loved to build
(good software). To a certain point, it's easy for N co-founders to keep
juggling all the balls that comprise running a business (rather than just
writing code). This is the "Infancy Phase," and all was well, just as he
describes.

It was the "Adolescent Phase" of the business where everything fell apart. All
the various things we were juggling became too much, and they started to fall
by the wayside. In my specific companies, I think a big cause of this was
trying to do _too much_ in terms of product.

And so I followed one of the paths he predicts--I threw my hands up, and
started small again with a new company. The revelation that did it was pretty
much exactly what he writes:

    
    
        You realize something you've avoided all these years...
        You don't own a business--you own a job... the worst job in the world!
        You can't close it when you want to... You can't leave it when you want to...
        You can't sell it when you want to, because who wants to buy a job?

------
JarekS
Geoffrey A. Moore - Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech
Products to Mainstream Customers -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm>

------
billswift
Eliyahu Goldratt _The Goal_ [http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-
Improvement/dp/08...](http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-
Improvement/dp/0884271781/)

Felix Dennis _How to Get Rich_ [http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-
Improvement/dp/08...](http://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-
Improvement/dp/0884271781/) which I found from a link here on HN last June.

------
mrlyc
David Maister at <http://davidmaister.com/>

I find him more practical than Drucker, Harvey-Jones and Robert Heller.

------
ArabGeek
Business Model generations :)

