Essential reading for entrepreneurs

When building a business, it is important to learn as much as possible from industry leaders and people with experience. Fortunately, many of these people have written about their experiences and distilled their most influential and successful ideas into books. There are thousands of business books, each claiming to teach you something vital to your success. Below are some of our favourites and ones we find genuinely enlightening.

The Lean Start-up: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

The lean philosophy focuses exclusively on the end customer, cutting away expenditure and resources that don’t work towards this goal. Eric Ries expands on the core concept of closely monitoring the customer’s needs, drawing on his many years of experience in the start-up world. His advice is particularly relevant for eCommerce businesses, where the user experience governs everything from the website layout to the product design.

The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

The Innovator’s Dilemma tackles the tricky subject of evolving your business to accommodate new technology and business models. Too many companies dismiss and fail to adapt to new innovations as their customers cannot currently use them, without having the foresight to anticipate their future value. This means a number of great ideas never fulfil their potential and can cause a business to lose market dominance. Christensen is a Harvard professor and businessman, using both his theoretical knowledge, as well as real-world business acumen, to create a road map for continued success.

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Despite being almost 80 years old, this business classic continues to influence and inspire entrepreneurs and business people around the world. Its lesson focus on key areas such as goal setting, with timeless advice and ideas that have the power to change your life. It breaks the path to success into 13 key stages, providing you with a philosophy of personal achievement.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink explores the science behind decision-making, with the main concept being “thin-slicing”. This is the idea that spontaneous decisions are equal to, or even better than, planned and prepared ones. This can be valuable when building an online business, with a focus on instinct as a way to avoid “analysis paralysis” and react to new technologies quickly and proactively.

Lucky or Smart? by Bo Peabody

Bo Peabody was an Internet multi-millionaire by the age of 27. He had grown five different companies across a range of industries, and steered them through economic twists and turns. In this book, he lays out the 50 most important things he has learnt and how he knows that being lucky is as important as being smart. This book is designed to help entrepreneurs put themselves in the position to take advantage of opportunities and create your own luck.

Let us know some of your favourites

We are always interested in what is helping our clients succeed. Tell us about some of your favourite books and how they have helped you become a better entrepreneur.