Download or read book The Soul of an Entrepreneur written by David Sax and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Restoring the Soul of Business written by Rishad Tobaccowala and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From old-fashioned bricks-and-mortars to cutting-edge startups, businesses are moving into uncharted territory as they determine how to move from an analog past to a digital future effectively. How can you make sure not to leave human instinct behind? Businesses are leaving behind traditional meetings in favor of virtual ones, transitioning from surveys and studies to analytics and algorithms. The startling and often unacknowledged truth is that?the promise of digital transformation can only be realized when we find a way to balance it with the promise of people.?In the end, it’s the people that matter, and companies must never forget the soul that drives them. In Restoring the Soul of Business, business leader Rishad Tobaccowala?teaches you to: Understand how to unleash the significant benefit that can be realized by combining emotion and data, human and machine, analog and digital. Spot the warning signs of data-blinded companies: cold cultures with little human interaction, poor innovation stemming from discouraged employees who don’t contribute ideas, and poor customer service due to automated, robotic processes. Explore how organizations of various sizes and from different industries have successfully reoriented their thinking on how to fuse technology and humanity. Gain skills to become an expert in connections critical to growth and success, including the connection between being creative and using technology. Everyone working in an organization will find penetrating observations and guidance about how and why establishing the proper balance between human intuition and creativity and data-driven insights can lead to increased revenue, profitability, retention—and even joy—in their careers and business. Restoring the Soul of Business provides practical tools and techniques that every organization can and should implement, and challenges you to move forward with the kind of balance that capitalizes transformation and produces one great success after another.

Download or read book Soul Trader written by Rasheed Ogunlaru and published by Kogan Page Publishers. This book was released on 2012-10-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If your heart's not in your business, why are you? In the flurry of everyday deadlines, fire fighting and all the pressing demands on our time, it's easy to forget the real reasons we started our own business in the first place. Soul Trader helps you connect with your personal mission, values and passion to create a 'stand out from the crowd' business that enriches you both financially and emotionally. Discover the seven essential principles that will help you build a business sensitive to today's economic and social realities, one that is profitable, customer-focused and in tune with your own beliefs, needs and goals. Rasheed Ogunlaru tears off the jargon and delves into the beating heart of what makes businesses really work. Throw your heart into your business, it will pay dividends.

Download or read book Building Corporate Soul written by Ralf Specht and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Founder s Dilemmas written by Noam Wasserman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

Download or read book Deep Purpose written by Ranjay Gulati and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

Download or read book The Soul of Design written by Robert Austin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes the Apple iPhone cool? Bang & Olufsen and Samsung's televisions beautiful? Any of a wide variety of products and services special? The answer is not simply functionality or technology, for competitors' products are often as good. The Soul of Design explores the uncanny power of some products to grab and hold attention—to create desire. To understand what sets a product apart in this way, authors Lee Devin and Robert Austin push past personal taste and individual response to adopt a more conceptual approach. They carefully explore the hypothesis that there is something within a "special" product that makes it—well, special. They argue that this je ne sais quoi arises from "plot"—the shape that emerges as a product or service arouses and then fulfills expectations. Marketing a special product is, then, a matter of helping its audience perceive its plot and comprehend its qualities. Devin and Austin provide keys to understanding why some products and services stand out in a crowd and how the companies that make them create these hits. Part One of the book introduces the authors' definition of plot in this context; Part Two breaks down the components needed to build a plot; Part Three describes what makes a plot coherent; Part Four takes on the challenges of making coherent products and services attractive to consumers. Part Four also presents detailed casework, which shows how innovators and makers have successfully brought special products to market. Readers will come away with a sensible and clear approach to conceiving of artful products and services. This book will help managers and designers think about engaging with plot, taking aesthetic factors into account to provide consumers with more special things.

Download or read book Soul of the Sea written by Nishan Degnarain and published by Leetes Island Books. This book was released on 2017-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication draws upon the fields of science, economics and business strategy to chart the future of humankind's relationship to the ocean. A healthy ocean provides the basis for a prosperous world, and oceans have been largely ignored as a driver of human well-being until now. Ocean health has been in a serious state of decline for the past 100 years from a range of pressures including human population growth, energy consumption and use of natural resources. Humanity will exceed the resources and environmental conditions necessary to exist, within the next century if nothing changes. Solutions to these challenges lie not only in traditional resource conservation management, but in new fields of technology, governance and innovation.

Download or read book Finding Soul From Silicon Valley to Africa written by Kurt Davis and published by Morgan James Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tech entrepreneur journeys across Africa in this inspiring memoir about economic development, spiritual growth, and how to live with purpose. In 2017, Kurt Davis traveled to Africa to volunteer with entrepreneurial support organizations and humanitarian non-profits. In Finding Soul, From Silicon Valley to Africa, Kurt shares his enlightening and inspiring experiences in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, and numerous other countries. His story sheds light on the power of entrepreneurialism as a tool for development. But it is also shares lessons about the profound power of empathy, what we gain when we release the ego, and how we can discover deeper meaning in our lives.

Download or read book Ask Your Developer written by Jeff Lawson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeff Lawson, developer turned CEO of Twilio (one of Bloomberg Businessweek's Top 50 Companies to Watch in 2021), creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital transformation. From banking and retail to insurance and finance, every industry is turning digital, and every company needs the best software to win the hearts and minds of customers. The landscape has shifted from the classic build vs. buy question, to one of build vs. die. Companies have to get this right to survive. But how do they make this transition? Software developers are sought after, highly paid, and desperately needed to compete in the modern, digital economy. Yet most companies treat them like digital factory workers without really understanding how to unleash their full potential. Lawson argues that developers are the creative workforce who can solve major business problems and create hit products for customers—not just grind through rote tasks. From Google and Amazon, to one-person online software companies—companies that bring software developers in as partners are winning. Lawson shows how leaders who build industry changing software products consistently do three things well. First, they understand why software developers matter more than ever. Second, they understand developers and know how to motivate them. And third, they invest in their developers' success. As a software developer and public company CEO, Lawson uses his unique position to bridge the language and tools executives use with the unique culture of high performing, creative software developers. Ask Your Developer is a toolkit to help business leaders, product managers, technical leaders, software developers, and executives achieve their common goal—building great digital products and experiences. How to compete in the digital economy? In short: Ask Your Developer.

Download or read book The Soul of Success written by Nick Nanton, Esq. and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Success is a concept universally embraced but individually defined. Our definition of success truly depends on our individual goals. For example, your goal might be monetary, a physical accomplishment or a moral achievement. To flesh out this topic, we are adding a few comments made by famous and successful people in diverse fields - similar and familiar concepts to those put forward by the Premier Experts(r) in this book. Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Booker T. Washington You can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed. Napoleon Hill The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will. Vince Lombardi Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. Thomas Jefferson In our New Economy, the acquisition of success has been reformatted somewhat by business and industry even though its principles remain the same. The Electronic Revolution has changed the economic landscape as much as the Industrial Revolution. We now live more and more in "real time" and expect others to do the same. This era of instant communication has changed the ways in which we communicate and expect responses. To succeed today, it is useful, perhaps essential, to have a mentor. Errors will be made, but to minimize them will speed up your journey. The Premier Experts(r) in this book will help you along the way. They have been there and know the road. Who would be better to guide you? They will illuminate your path to The Soul Of Success..

Download or read book Managing Startups Best Blog Posts written by Thomas Eisenmann and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you want salient advice about your startup, you’ve hit the jackpot with this book. Harvard Business School Professor Tom Eisenmann annually compiles the best posts from many blogs on technology startup management, primarily for the benefit of his students. This book makes his latest collection available to the broader entrepreneur community. You’ll find 72 posts from successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, such as Fred Wilson, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, Joel Spolsky, and Ben Yoskovitz. They cover a wide range of topics essential to your startup’s success, including: Management tasks: Engineering, product management, marketing, sales, and business development Organizational issues: Cofounder tensions, recruiting, and career planning Funding: The latest developments in capital markets that affect startups Divided into 13 areas of focus, the book’s contributors explore the metrics you need to run your startup, discuss lean prototyping techniques for hardware, identify costly outsourcing mistakes, provide practical tips on user acquisition, offer branding guidelines, and explain how a choir of angel investors often will sing different parts. And that’s just for starters.

Download or read book Straight Talk for Startups written by Randy Komisar and published by HarperBusiness. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Straight Talk for Startups memorializes age-old best practices and empowers both experienced and new investment professionals to beat the odds."—David Krane, CEO, Google Ventures "Straight Talk for Startups is filled with real, raw, and fact-based ‘rules of the road’ that you need to know when diving into our ultra-competitive startup world. A must read and a re-read!"—Tony Fadell, Coinventor of the iPod/iPhone & Founder of Nest Labs Veteran venture capitalist Randy Komisar and finance executive Jantoon Reigersman share no-nonsense, counterintuitive guidelines to help anyone build a successful startup. Over the course of their careers, Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman continue to see startups crash and burn because they forget the timeless lessons of entrepreneurship. But, as Komisar and Reigersman show, you can beat the odds if you quickly learn what insiders know about what it takes to build a healthy foundation for a thriving venture. In Straight Talk for Startups they walk budding entrepreneurs through 100 essential rules—from pitching your idea to selecting investors to managing your board to deciding how and when to achieve liquidity. Culled from their own decades of experience, as well as the experiences of their many successful colleagues and friends, the rules are organized under broad topics, from "Mastering the Fundamentals" and "Selecting the Right Investors," to "The Ideal Fundraise," "Building and Managing Effective Boards," and "Achieving Liquidity." Vital rules you’ll find in Straight Talk for Startups include: The best ideas originate from founders who are users Create two business plans: an execution plan and an aspirational plan Net income is an option, but cash flow is a fact Don’t accept money from strangers Personal wealth doesn’t equal good investing Small boards are better than big ones Add independent board members for expertise and objectivity Too many unanimous board decisions are a sign of trouble Choose an acquirer, don’t wait to be chosen Learn the rules by heart so you know when to break them Filled with helpful real-life examples and specific, actionable advice, Straight Talk for Startups is the ideal handbook for anyone running, working for, or thinking about creating a startup, or just curious about what makes high-potential ventures tick.

Download or read book Burn Rate written by Andy Dunn and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this “gripping” (TechCrunch), “eye-opening” (Gayle King, Oprah Daily) memoir of mental illness and entrepreneurship, the co-founder of the menswear startup Bonobos opens up about the struggle with bipolar disorder that nearly cost him everything. “Arrestingly candid . . . the most powerful book I’ve read on manic depression since An Unquiet Mind.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife At twenty-eight, fresh from Stanford’s MBA program and steeped in the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley, Andy Dunn was on top of the world. He was building a new kind of startup—a digitally native, direct-to-consumer brand—out of his Manhattan apartment. Bonobos was a new-school approach to selling an old-school product: men’s pants. Against all odds, business was booming. Hustling to scale the fledgling venture, Dunn raised tens of millions of dollars while boundaries between work and life evaporated. As he struggled to keep the startup afloat, Dunn was haunted by a ghost: a diagnosis of bipolar disorder he received after a frightening manic episode in college, one that had punctured the idyllic veneer of his midwestern upbringing. He had understood his diagnosis as an unspeakable shame that—according to the taciturn codes of his fraternity, the business world, and even his family—should be locked away. As Dunn’s business began to take off, however, some of the very traits that powered his success as a founder—relentless drive, confidence bordering on hubris, and ambition verging on delusion—were now threatening to undo him. A collision course was set in motion, and it would culminate in a night of mayhem—one poised to unravel all that he had built. Burn Rate is an unconventional entrepreneurial memoir, a parable for the twenty-first-century economy, and a revelatory look at the prevalence of mental illness in the startup community. With intimate prose, Andy Dunn fearlessly shines a light on the dark side of success and challenges us all to take part in the deepening conversation around creativity, performance, and disorder.

Download or read book Startup Opportunities written by Sean Wise and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Start strong with essential early-stage guidance from the VC perspective Startup Opportunities is the go-to guide for anyone with a great business idea. Whether it's your first business or your fifth, realistic assessment from the outset can save you a lot of time and money; why pour your heart and soul into a venture that is doomed to fail? Instead, position yourself to win from the very beginning. In this book, accomplished venture capitalists share their insight on startups and entrepreneurs: who will fail, who will succeed and why, and what you should do to give your business the very best shot at becoming a global success story. You'll learn how to evaluate your business with a critical eye, and how early customer development can be key in turning a good idea into a great opportunity. If you're serious about building a business that lasts, this book provides invaluable guidance that you really cannot miss. More than five million people will launch a business this year, and many of them will be great ideas—yet few will be around in five years, and even fewer in ten years. A great idea is not enough to build a successful business. You need to fortify your idea with the proper foundation, and a scaffolding of good planning and early action. This book shows you how. Assess your business's viability using the 10x Rule Learn when you can quit your day job—or not Take the key steps to making your business succeed Discover the opportunities worth selling everything for This expert author team has witnessed more than 30,000 pitches over two decades, and have participated in over 500 startup launches. Startup Opportunities gives you the benefit of their experience to help you start strong and stay strong.

Download or read book Startup CXO written by Matt Blumberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-06-09 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest challenges for startup teams is scaling because usually there's not a blueprint to follow, people are learning their function as they go, and everyone is wearing multiple hats. There can be lots of trial and error, lots of missteps, and lots of valuable time and money squandered as companies scale. Matt Blumberg and his team understand the scaling challenges—they've been there, and it took them nearly 20 years to scale and achieve a successful exit. Along the way they learned what worked and what didn’t work, and they share their lessons learned in Startup CXO. Unlike other business books, Startup CXO is designed to help each functional leader understand how their function scales, what to anticipate as they scale, and what things to avoid. Beyond providing function-specific advice, tools, and tactics, Startup CXO is a resource for each team member to learn about the other functions, understand other functional challenges, and get greater clarity on how to collaborate effectively with the other functional leads. CEOs, Board members, and investors have a book they can consult to pinpoint areas of weakness and learn how to turn those into strengths. Startup CXO has in-depth chapters covering the nine most common functions in startups: finance, people, marketing, sales, customers, business development, product, operations, and privacy. Each functional section has a "CEO to CEO Advice" summary from Blumberg on what great looks like for that CXO, signs your CXO isn't scaling, and how to engage with your CXO. Startup CXO also has a section on the future of executive work, fractional and interim roles. Written by leading practitioners in the newly emergent fractional executive world, each function is covered with useful tips on how to be a successful fractional executive as well as what to look for and how to manage fractional executives. Startup CXO is an amazing resource for CEOs but also for functional leaders and professionals at any stage of their career." —Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner, High Alpha

Download or read book The Startup of You Revised and Updated written by Reid Hoffman and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking #1 New York Times bestseller that taught a generation how to transform their careers—now in a revised and updated edition “A profound book about self-determination and self-realization.”—Senator Cory Booker “The Startup of You is crammed with insights and strategies to help each of us create the work life we want.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project In this invaluable book, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today’s competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a startup business: a living, breathing, growing startup of you. Why? Startups—and the entrepreneurs who run them—are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. This book isn’t about cover letters or résumés. Instead, you will learn the best practices of the most successful startups and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career. Whether you work for a giant multinational corporation, stitch together multiple gigs in a portfolio career, or are launching your own venture, you need to know how to • adapt your career plans as pandemics rage and technologies upend industries • develop a competitive advantage so that you stand out from others at work • strengthen your professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships • engineer serendipity that produces life-changing career opportunities • take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis • tap your network for information and intelligence that help you make smarter decisions The career landscape has changed dramatically in the decade since Hoffman and Casnocha first published this guide. In an urgent update to the frameworks that have helped hundreds of thousands of people transform their careers, this new edition of The Startup of You will teach you how to achieve your boldest professional ambitions.