Do you manage different projects for your business?

Do you want your company to succeed?

If you answer yes on the questions than you will need managerial skills. You will also need leadership skills.

One way to increase your business potential energy in your managerial skills is to find, read and learn from different books that cover the topics. Here, I want to share the list of the most important managerial books that I think you as an entrepreneur must read if you want to manage your company to the success.

The list is not in some type of ranging order.

1. The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses is something that can increase your business potential energy implementing lean principles in your small business. The book uses the basis of lean production to help you to create a really innovative company through continuous learning, experimenting and testing your vision as an entrepreneur.

2. Linchpin

Linchpin – Are You Indispensable? Book, that will change your thinking about everything in your company. Book that will open your eyes to look on the things in your company very differently and in correlation with today’s reality. Seth Godin talk about how your managerial and leadership style can make you, your partners, your coworkers and your employees indispensable. It’s a must-read book for entrepreneurs.

3. StrengthsFinder 2.0

I know that you as an entrepreneur know many things to do. But, do you know what you can do the best. Do you do something that you can do the best? Do you find yourself fixing your shortcomings or your weaknesses instead developing your strengths? Strengths Finder 2.0 is the book that can help you find your biggest strengths, develop them and start building on them.

4. Good to Great

Good to Great by Jim Collins is something that must be read from each entrepreneur. Nobody is perfect. But, how your company can achieve enduring greatness from something that can be called good business, mediocre business or even bad business. The book will show you why some companies becomes truly great performers while the other remain only good.

5. Thinking Fast and Slow

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is about our thinking, or our mind and the way we use it in our thinking. The book explains the two systems we use in our thinking process: first is the fast thinking system that is based on intuition and emotions, and second is a slow thinking system based on logic. It is important for you as an entrepreneur to know when you can and when you can’t trust your intuition.

6. The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell is book about change that can start from something very small, and transfer the whole your life, or the whole your business. This is the tipping point phenomenon that the author explains in the book. It’s a must-read book for entrepreneurs.

7. Start With Why

Think about how many times you come to the great idea to improve your company after ask and answer on one simple question that starts with why, or maybe it is only why. In Start With Why, Simon Sinek provides the framework on the idea that he calls “The Golden Circle”. That idea can help you to build great business, and it starts with “why”.

8. The E-Myth Revisited

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber will guide you through the process that you need to implement if you want to succeed in all of your business life cycle stages. Another important aspect that you will learn reading the book is the distinction between working on your business and working in your business.

9. The Speed of Trust

You as an entrepreneur will always need trust around of you. You need your customers to trust you. You need your employees to trust you. You need your partners to trust you. The trust is an essential ingredient for each small business. How much quickly you build it, the quicker your business will become successful. The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey is the book that will lead you through the process of creating strong trust around you and your business.

10. Blue Ocean Strategy

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant is something that can give you many ideas how to approach on your market with something really different, something that will create the new market and the new need for your products and services. The authors called this different and new as a “blue ocean” that you need to create on the market.

That road to success is never a straight line, and more probably it will be as a curve, broken line or something that will push you to the left, then to the right, then again, to the left, again to the right… That’s a zig zag road. On that road, you as an entrepreneur need to zigzag if you want to reach the success.

That’s true and because of that I like the newest book by Rich Christiansen titled as The Zig Zag Principle – The Goal-Setting Strategy That Will Revolutionize Your Business and Your Life (amazon affiliate link).

It is very difficult to define precisely the road to the success of an entrepreneur. And that’s something that Rich Christiansen tried to define, and I think he succeeded in the efforts to make as clear as possible that road of uncertainty.

Let’s look how you can define your road to success that will increase the probability to achieve that success.

#1 Start Creating the Foundation

We know that entrepreneurs make something from nothing, but rather they make something from their own capital, or as I say their own business potential energy. If you have larger business potential energy in you as an entrepreneur, you can easily define your own road to the success.

You need to know exactly what is the success for you. You need to have your own resources that you need to invest in your business. You need to define your own values that you will follow on the entrepreneurial journey that you want to start.

#2 Start Zigzagging Toward Your Goals

When you have your foundation you can start with the first zig that mean you need to become profitable. Without profitability, your business will not succeed. The second zag starts only when you become profitable, and you need to add resources, processes and systems into your business. And the third zig is to scale your business.

#3 On Your Journey You Need Guardrails

On this uncertainty journey you need something that will tell you that you leave your road, which leads to the success.

#4 You Need to Motivate Yourself and Your Team

How you can reward yourself and your team after each zig and zag to continue to the final goal – success of your business? You need a reward system that will motivate people in your business to continue the road.

And yes, there will be more than these basic steps. You will need more zig and zags as you are on your entrepreneurial journey. But, if you put the real system into the practice, you will succeed.

I highly recommend reading this book that is simple to read, full with experience studies and with the tools that will lead you to the success on your entrepreneurial journey.

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers

by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

We leave in the time where changes cannot be followed with our eyes. That changes in the business environment ask for changes in our business. Is there a better starting point to change your business than your business plan? I love the book. It is as my own entrepreneurial bible. There are many case studies, many tools and many approaches to develop and design your business model.

If you want to stay in one step ahead from your competition, you need Business Model Generation.

The Entrepreneur Equation: Evaluating Realities, Risks and Rewards of Having Your Own Business

by Carol Roth and Michael Port

To be an entrepreneur is not easy. If it is so, everyone will be an entrepreneur and there will not be people who will work for others. This book will help you if you didn’t already start your business to do the math before you start with your entrepreneurial path. You can learn how you can build successful business as well as how to access the risk and rewards being an entrepreneur.

If you want to be your own boss, read the Entrepreneur Equation first.

Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions

by Guy Kawasaki

Enchantment is such a book where content is presented in one big plan, or guide through the process of enchanting people, customers, colleagues, employees, businesses… If you look at the headings of the content of the book you’l be seen that it covers a finished plan ready to be implemented in your business and your entrepreneurial life. In the book, you’l be find answers about:

• How to achieve likability and trustworthiness?
• How to prepare and launch?
• How to overcome resistance?
• How to make enchantment endure?
• How to use push (presentation, email and twitter) and pull technologies (websites, blogs, Facebook, Linkedin…)?
• How to enchant your boss and your employees?
• How to resist enchantment?

If you want to use enchantment as one of the most important elements to attract customers and build great relationships with them, you must read the Enchantment.

Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul

by Howard Schultz and Joanne Gordon

The book is a snapshot of a moment in history about rising empire with an entrepreneurial spirit, then losing that spirit and struggling and again recreated the empire. You can find really useful knowledge about vision, day-to-day conflicts and leadership in the person with an entrepreneurial spirit.

If you want to learn from successful entrepreneurs about their growth, personal philosophy and possible problems that can occupy every business the Onward is the right book for you.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives

by Steven Levy

This is another book about successful company that in the past ten years changes the ways how entrepreneurs doing business. The author takes readers inside Google’s headquarters and shows how this company works. From innovation, staffing, problems to the most innovative solution for the company’s cash cow the book gives some interesting knowledge for entrepreneurs.

If you want to extend your knowledge about Google and in the same time to find interesting case studies about entrepreneurship. In the Plex is a good starting point for you.

The Thank You Economy

by Gary Vaynerchuk

This book is about some new economy called The Thank You Economy born at the internet that describes the new way how we communicate, how we buy and sell and how we interact with each other. Here, you can find some new ways about doing business and how you can make your progress in entirely new business era.

If you want to be part of this new way of doing business, it is worth reading The Thankyou Economy.

Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

by Michael A. Stelzner

An interesting thing that attracted me to buy and read this book is that ideas and principles in the book were developed and practiced by the author. The main idea from the book is to focus on customers needs without pushing too many marketing messages. The book is based on the equation that tells us that if we want growth, we need great content plus other people minus marketing messages.

If you want to read something really easy to follow with case studies, this book is for you.

Interesting question is how to get what you want and in the same time to use what you have.

Use What You Have to Get What You Want

Jack Nadel is an entrepreneur, founder of Jack Nadel International that start his business without money, education or experience as stated in the book. In the next 65 year, he built their business empire that created thousands of new jobs and hundreds of products worldwide. This history was something that encouraged me to read the book.

What’s inside the book?

Use What You have to Get What You Want, is a simple book that has only hundred pages, but each page contains valuable ideas. It’s a hundred valuable ideas book that will help you to rethink your skills set and use it to get what you want.

In the book you can find ideas about finding the best business opportunities, ideas about managing, ideas about advises, ideas about negotiations, ideas about banks and their impact on your business, ideas about accountants who will make bookkeeping on your business and so on…

As an example I will mention some of the ideas that can be found in the book:

1. Find a need and fill it.
2. Do your own research.
3. If the premise is wrong everything that follow is wrong.
4. Features tell and benefits sell.
5. Honesty is not only the best policy; it’s the most profitable.
6. Ask not how many people your advertising reaches, ask how many it sells.
7. It’s okay to lose a battle… just make sure you win the war.
8. Don’t let your ego get in the way.
9. A good accountant is not just a scorekeeper.
10. Truly understanding the problem is halfway to the solution.

Something that I think is good about presentation of these ideas in the book is that each idea contains general advises and case study from the author’s experience.

For Whom is This Book?

This book is first for all entrepreneurs who want to learn something from people who have experience the field of managing and growing own business. However, also this book is for everyone who wants to rethink their own skills and start to use what they have to get what they want.

At first that I can say about this book is that it is much different from the rest books that I’ve read about business ideas. While most books concentrate on how to come to a good business idea, this book concentrates on how to make the best business ideas become reality (to be happen, to transform into a successful business).

A business idea is one of the factors that contain business potential energy(a concept which I define and use for business improvement). However, sometimes that business potential energy is not converted (transformed) into kinetic energy (real business action). And exactly this process of transformation of an idea in an action is covered in this book.

What is Making Ideas Happen?

The book begins with the following sentence:

Ideas don’t happen because they are great or by accident.

So there is no accidence or warranty because the idea is a great that it would succeed. To succeed or happen, according to Scott Belsky, there is a need of the following sum:

Making Ideas Happen = Ideas + Organization + Communal Forces + Leadership Capability

This book covers everything except getting to the ideas.

• Organization. Without proper organization that will provide additional action steps and future directions for completing the project (idea), the idea can be forgotten and left somewhere on the side without the potential to become a reality.
• Community. Each idea must not be in isolation. Your business will not be just for you. Because of that, this concept includes the community that will  spread the idea. Besides spreading of the idea at this stage it is necessary to listen to the community and make improvements of the idea.
• Leadership Capability. Everything that is new or creative is causing resistance. Therefore, effective leadership in the process of implementation of business ideas is inevitable for a proper success.

For Whom is This Book?

Firstly, this book is for all entrepreneurs, present or future. I do not believe that there is no man who does not have at least one idea for starting a business. We are all creative. It is inborn in humans. Whole our life is solving problems, and problems require creativity.

However, different individuals have different quantity and quality of the ideas. The book is not only about business ideas, it also about ideas for projects, activities, lifestyle improvements… Especially help from this book can receive all those who have many ideas, and in a same time weak implementation. With the help of this book, they will learn a process on how to transfer ideas from something abstract, something non-existent in reality into the something real.

A Few Excerpts That Were Interesting To Me

With the Kindle I was able to highlight interesting or important parts from the book. Here are some of them:

• Once you have everything classified as a project, you can start breaking each one down into its primary components: Action Steps, References, and Backburner Items.
• No Action Steps, no action, no results.
• The more clear and concrete an Action Step is, the less friction you will encounter trying to do it. If an Action Step is vague or complicated, you will probably skip over it to others on your list that are more straightforward.
• When it comes to organizing your Action Steps of the day – and how your energy  will be allocated – create two lists: one for urgent items and other for the important ones.
• Make a daily focus areas.
• Whether you work alone or with a team, a commitment to early action –without too much conviction – will help ideas materialize.
• A big part of execution is persistence.

The authors start the book with the very simple question “What the book is about?” and simplest answer that the book is:

Answer to the question “What do I do now?”

What the Book is About?

Behind this book are people who succeed to build a solid trust using the Internet and in the same time to use it in building successful businesses. Simply, this book opens some new views on the online presence of the businesses and how entrepreneurs can use it to accomplish their business objects.

To achieve this goal the authors based on six specific features or behaviors of trust agents that are treated in separate chapters of the book. This features are:

1. Trust agents make their own game. But, the game in which they are the best.
2. They are one of us. Each trust agent is part of our community.
3. Archimedes Principle – Give me the lever, large enough, and I can move the world. They use tools to leverage their path to success.
4. They are agents zero – central figures in their community where they make their own game.
5. They are still people who understand others, communicate with others, who maintain the others, who share with others…
6. They build the army. They know that nothing can accomplish as an individual and because of that they cooperate with the community.

What are the Main Features of This Book?

I can freely say that all books have their own features and their own contribution to intellectual development of a person. However, about this book I would like to mention the following features:

• Easy to read.
• It is practical.
• It is full of experiential content.
• It is full of real examples.
• It is a guide for strengthening relations on the web.

Who Will Benefit From This Book?

This book is primarily designed for small business, entrepreneurs or people who take action. Except for business owners this book can be also useful for all professionals that in some way are involved in businesses and certainly for people who deal with marketing.

The authors of this book are the people behind HubSpot – Inbound Marketing Software Company. Their experience with their own company in addition to their experience working for other companies as consultants they’ve poured into this book.

What is Inbound Marketing – Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs?

As I wrote in my previous post about Inbound Marketing, this type of marketing is the marketing for today and future. Now to be good at marketing, regardless how much money your business has, but how much you’re smart and creative to use the technology in your marketing goals.

This is something that’s covered in this book. As the title says this book will give you strategies and tactics that will change your thinking about marketing your business. It’s how to be found on Google, social media and blogs.

Why to Get Found on Google, Social Media and Blogs?

In every marketing campaign, entrepreneur and marketers are trying to be present at places where potential customers are. What are these places? Where is a consumer or potential customer for a product or service start to find information about products or services that they need?

Maybe earlier they seated ahead of TV or listen to radio to see or hear an ad. Maybe once they read newspapers and magazines to see some interesting product. However, today, the behavior of people is changed because the power of the Internet. Today people are online.

Today when I would like to know whether there’s any product or service that would solve my problem, I go to Google and search. Through Google, I  reach the various websites and blogs that I read to be informed enough to decide before buying. Sometimes I can receive very useful information through social media. These mean that I not consume traditional marketing media. And why I’ll consume it when I’m constantly connected to the Internet and through the internet to all available online information.

Because of that your business should be found on Google, social media and blogs, and that’s the main subject of this book. Therefore, you should have it, read it, re-read it and implement strategies and tactics that are listed in it.

Book Features

I’d like to abstract some of the main features of Inbound Marketing – Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs that really cause impressions on me:

• Language. The first impression from reading the book is the language used by the authors. The book language isn’t a technical language, isn’t a scientific language that’s difficult to be understand from non-technical people. Used style by the authors is understandable for everyone, even for those which first time encounter with these concepts.
• Comprehensiveness. Although the book isn’t large – 220 pages, it’s comprehensive in terms of what entrepreneurs need to start today to have success in inbound marketing.
• Inbound marketing in action. Each chapter in the book has a part called Inbound marketing in action – case studies or example of the success of this type of marketing.
• To-Do List. After each chapter there’s a list of activities that must be conducted about starting inbound marketing techniques.

Really worth book for the price that’s less than $25.

Who’s The Ideal Person for This Book?

Really important question. This book has the potential to help everyone. Potential to help complete novice in this subject and the potential to help any marketing expert to improve their knowledge. Anyway I think the main group of those who should have this book are:

• Entrepreneurs. Each current and potential entrepreneur who’d like to maximize the utilization of marketing activities in their own business must have and read the book. Regardless what type of business posses the entrepreneur this book will be helpful for all of them.
• Marketers. Anyone who’s in touch with any type of marketing, should have and use this book.

If you really want to improve your marketing effectiveness and your overall business you must implement strategies and tactics from this book.