The Soul of an Entrepreneur

The Soul of an Entrepreneur
Author: David Sax
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1541730364

An award-winning business writer dismantles the myths of entrepreneurship, replacing them with an essential story about the experience of real business owners in the modern economy. We're often told that we're living amidst a startup boom. Typically, we think of apps built by college kids and funded by venture capital firms, which remake fortunes and economies overnight. But in reality, most new businesses are things like restaurants or hair salons. Entrepreneurs aren't all millennials -- more often, it's their parents. And those small companies are the fabric of our economy. The Soul of an Entrepreneur is a business book of a different kind, exploring our work but also our passions and hopes. David Sax reports on the deeply personal questions of entrepreneurship: why an immigrant family risks everything to build a bakery; how a small farmer fights to manage his debt; and what it feels like to rise and fall with a business you built for yourself. This book is the real story of entrepreneurship. It confronts both success and failure, and shows how they can change a human life. It captures the inherent freedom that entrepreneurship brings, and why it matters.

Beyond Product

Beyond Product
Author: Jill Soley
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1642791261

Beyond Product serves as a roadmap for dreamers, big idea people, founders, entrepreneurs, and trailblazers to transport their ideas from concept to successful business. Is this the Golden Age of the Founder? With only an idea and some change from the couch, a whole new generation of entrepreneurs are building apps, launching businesses, and developing creative new solutions for long-existing problems. People laud the successes, but the truth is Most of these new businesses fail. The world expects the creators of these brilliant ideas to be great at everything, but most struggle along the way. The best product doesn't always win. Even good products need a good strategy for bringing them to market. Beyond Product provides the missing link for entrepreneurs and founders to turn their ideas into successful businesses. More than 50 business leaders have lent their perspectives and joined with marketers Todd Wilms and Jill Soley to help the big-idea crowd bring their passion to the marketplace and find their customer. Beyond Product shows founders how to take their organization through various stages of growth, overcome obstacles, and learn from common mistakes. For every founder who ever found it lonely at the top, this roadmap serves as a coveted best friend as they launch their great idea into the market.

Why Startups Fail

Why Startups Fail
Author: Tom Eisenmann
Publisher: Currency
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0593137035

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Beyond Entrepreneurship

Beyond Entrepreneurship
Author: James Charles Collins
Publisher: Business & Professional Division
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1992
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

This inspiring and yet eminently practical guide shows entrepreneurs how to steer a company to enduring greatness. Leadership style, vision, corporate strategy, innovation, tactical excellence and other key elements are all explored in depth.

Beyond Great

Beyond Great
Author: Arindam Bhattacharya
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1541757157

Great is no longer good enough. Beyond Great delivers a powerful new playbook of 9 core strategies to thrive in a post-COVID world where all the rules of the game are being re-written. Beyond Great answers to two fundamental questions which face business leaders today in a world shaped by daunting and disruptive technological, economic, and social change. First, what is outstanding performance in this new volatile era? Second, how do we build competitive advantage in a world with new and often uncertain rules? Supported by years of research and hands-on consulting practice, this book presents a comprehensive framework for building a high performing, resilient, adaptive, and socially responsible global company. The book begins by taking an incisive look at these disruptive forces transforming globalization, including economic nationalism; the boom in data flows and digital commerce; the rise of China; heightened public concerns about capitalism and the environment; and the emergence of borderless communities of digitally connected consumers. Distilled from the study of hundreds of companies and interviews with dozens of business leaders, the authors have distilled nine core strategies – the new winning playbook of the 21st century. Beyond Great argues that business leaders today must lead with a new kind of openness, flexibility and light-footedness, constantly layering in new strategies and operational norms atop existing ones to allow for "always-on" transformation. Leaders must master a whole new set of rules about what it takes to be "global," becoming shapeshifters adept at handling contradiction, multiplicity, and nuance. This book will show them how.

The Unicorn's Shadow

The Unicorn's Shadow
Author: Ethan Mollick
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1613630972

Bringing hard data to the way we think about entrepreneurial success, this bold call to action draws on the latest scientific evidence to dispel the most pervasive startup myths and light a path to entrepreneurship for those eclipsed by the hype. When you think of a successful entrepreneur, who comes to mind? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe even Jesse Eisenberg, the man who played Zuckerberg in The Social Network? It may surprise you that most successful founders look very different from Zuckerberg or Gates. In fact, most startup origin stories are very different from the famous "unicorns" that have achieved valuations of over $1 billion, from Facebook to Google to Uber. In The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors, Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick takes us to the forefront of an empirical revolution in entrepreneurship. New data and better research methods have overturned the conventional wisdom behind what a successful founder looks like, how they succeed, and how the startup ecosystem works. Among the issues he examines: Which founders are most likely to succeed?Where do the best startup ideas come from?What's the most foolproof way of securing the funding needed to take a company to the next level?Should your sales pitch really be something out of Hollywood?What's the best way to grow and scale your company and create a thriving culture that won't hinder expansion? Mollick argues that entrepreneurship is too important, both for society and for the individuals who start companies, to be eclipsed by the shadows of unicorns. He shows we can democratize entrepreneurship—but only by following an evidence-based approach that puts to rest the false narratives that surround it.

Start-up Nation

Start-up Nation
Author: Dan Senor
Publisher: Twelve
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2011-09-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1455503460

What the world can learn from Israel's meteoric economic success. Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion dollar question: How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources-- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK? With the savvy of foreign policy insiders, Senor and Singer examine the lessons of the country's adversity-driven culture, which flattens hierarchy and elevates informality-- all backed up by government policies focused on innovation. In a world where economies as diverse as Ireland, Singapore and Dubai have tried to re-create the "Israel effect", there are entrepreneurial lessons well worth noting. As America reboots its own economy and can-do spirit, there's never been a better time to look at this remarkable and resilient nation for some impressive, surprising clues.

Bad Blood

Bad Blood
Author: John Carreyrou
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-05-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1524731668

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The gripping story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos—one of the biggest corporate frauds in history—a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley, rigorously reported by the prize-winning journalist. With a new Afterword covering her trial and sentencing, bringing the story to a close. “Chilling ... Reads like a thriller ... Carreyrou tells [the Theranos story] virtually to perfection.” —The New York Times Book Review In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings—from journalists to their own employees.

Building Corporate Soul

Building Corporate Soul
Author: Ralf Specht
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1639080031

To succeed, the business of the future must have soul. Building Corporate Soul answers the most pressing questions for leaders today: How do I build and sustain a human-centric performance culture? At a time when 10,000 baby boomers retire every day, 79% of employees quit their jobs because they don't feel appreciated at their workplace, and 69% of millennials see a lack of potential for leadership development in their companies, Building Corporate Soul sets out to transform the performance and value of organizations—and to make soulless companies a thing of the past. Ralf Specht’s unique framework, The Soul System™, aligns value-creating employee behaviors with corporate strategy through shared understanding and shared purpose. Based on the latest research and real-life cases, this actionable framework shows how to build a culture at the workplace that is both human centric and success driven. Specht proves that leadership behaviors that build soul are synonymous with the behaviors that build success. His performance ranking, The Soul Index, confirms that companies that operate within this framework outperform their peers by a factor of 2.6 compared with Dow Jones over 5 years. Building Corporate Soul helps leaders at every level move beyond their current thinking and create an environment in which business goals are well understood and corporations walk their talk. Both this shared understanding and the subsequent shared behavior are critical to turn a company´s purpose into a real means to an end: superior success and a truly motivated workforce that is proud of its role inside the organization and of its impact on the local community and society overall. You'll see how companies of all sizes (startups and legacy corporations) have made this happen. You'll also learn how every leader, no matter the industry, can ignite (or re-ignite) the corporate soul in their firm. Ralf Specht is a visionary business leader and creator of the Soul System™, a framework that aligns value-creating employee action with broader corporate strategy through shared understanding and shared purpose. As a founding partner of Spark44, he was the architect of an innovative, industry-first joint venture with Jaguar Land Rover, which grew under his leadership to a global revenue of $100+m and 1,200 employees before it joined forces with Accenture Interactive in 2021. Previously, he consulted with global companies and brands for more than two decades with McCann Erickson. Besides Building Corporate Soul: Powering Culture & Success with the Soul System™, he is the author of the forthcoming book Beyond the Startup: Sparking Operational Innovations for Global Growth.

Mentor to Millions

Mentor to Millions
Author: Kevin Harrington
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1401970613

Kevin Harrington, one of the original "sharks" of the TV hit Shark Tank, and serial entrepreneur Mark Timm take you on a journey that radically redefines what it means to truly succeed--at work, at home, and in every area of life. On one of the best days of his life as an entrepreneur, Mark Timm found himself sitting in his car at the end of his driveway. In just a minute he would go into the house and greet his wife and children. But as he basked in the success he'd just had, he also had to face a surprising realization: he didn't really want to go home. Mark knew that once he stepped into the happy chaos of his family, the euphoria of the day would evaporate. His work life and his home life might as well have been two different worlds. And at that moment, he acknowledged--as he puts it--that "my businesses were getting my first and my best, while my family got my last and my least." Mentor to Millions charts Mark's journey from that pivotal moment to a whole new understanding of how work, life, and relationships can coexist and thrive together. His guide through this journey: his accomplished mentor, Kevin Harrington, one of the original "sharks" from Shark Tank, who shares amazing stories and imparts invaluable wisdom about how to win in business and in every area of life. This deeply personal, easy-to-follow book invites you to join Mark and Kevin on the journey. Every page pulls back the curtain on entrepreneurship at the highest level, revealing priceless business lessons--which lead to the biggest lesson of all: combining the best of business, family, and personal life. If you're succeeding in business, struggling, or just starting out, and want your life at home to be what you've always dreamed it can be, this is the lesson you need to learn: the most valuable business you'll ever own, work for, or be a part of isn't the business you go to every day, it's the one you go home to.