Business

W. Chan Kim

In this perennial best seller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans" - untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes: a new preface by the authors: "Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red"; updates on all cases and examples in the book; and two new chapters and an expanded third one - "Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps" - that address some of the most pressing questions listeners and readers have asked over the years.

Business

Andrew Carnegie

This is the classic work on the best ways to distribute surplus wealth throughout the community, by American businessman Andrew Carnegie, with a 2019 afterword to address issues that have arisen since Mr. Carnegie's time.

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was a Scottish American industrialist, business magnate, and philanthropist. Carnegie's most prominent business was the expansion of the American steel industry. Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), Carnegie Hall (New York City), the Carnegie Hero Fund, and Carnegie "units" (university credit hours) are just some of what remains today of his immense legacy in American and world history.

Business

Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.

While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.

Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Business

Mickey Mantle and Ron Lichty

The Essential Guide to Effectively Managing Developers So You Can Deliver Better Software?Now Extensively Updated

“Lichty and Mantle have assembled a guide that will help you hire, motivate, and mentor a software development team that functions at the highest level. Their rules of thumb and coaching advice form a great blueprint for new and experienced software engineering managers alike.”
?Tom Conrad, CTO, Pandora

“Reading this book’s nuggets felt like the sort of guidance that I would get from a trusted mentor. A mentor who I not only trusted, but one who trusted me to take the wisdom, understand its limits, and apply it correctly.”
?Mike Fauzy, CTO, FauzyLogic


Today, many software projects continue to run catastrophically over schedule and budget, and still don’t deliver what customers want. Some organizations conclude that software development can’t be managed well. But it can?and it starts with people. In their extensively updated Managing the Unmanageable, Second Edition, Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty show how to hire and develop programmers, onboard new hires quickly and successfully, and build and nurture highly effective and productive teams.

Drawing on over 80 years of combined industry experience, the authors share Rules of Thumb, Nuggets of Wisdom, checklists, and other Tools for successfully leading programmers and teams, whether they’re co-located or dispersed worldwide. This edition adds extensive new Agile coverage, new approaches to recruitment and onboarding, expanded coverage of handling problem employees, and much more. Whether you’re new to software management or you’ve done it for years, you’ll find indispensable advice for handling your challenges and delivering outstanding software.

Find, recruit, and hire the right programmers, when you need them
Manage programmers as the individuals they are
Motivate software people and teams to accomplish truly great feats
Create a successful development subculture that can thrive even in a toxic company culture
Master the arts of managing down and managing up
Embrace your role as a manager who empowers self-directed agile teams to thrive and succeed

Business

Eric Ries

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.