Business Books You Should Read 2 Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma is a must-read for anyone in business, where their position allows them to effect what products are researched, produced marketed or distributed. Simply put, the topic of the book is about the difference between sustaining innovations, which are improvements to a product that are known to be desired by current customers, and disruptive innovations, that present a different value proposition, and thus are not (currently) interesting to your current customers. The author persuasively argues that the way in which companies are run by good managers is very successful when dealing with sustaining innovations, but when these same techniques are applied to disruptive technologies, they almost always cause the company to fail. I have seen so many incidences of this insight over my business career, and the author presents several very strong case studies, that I must say that I agree with him. A very important book. High-stakes, No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson, founder of Vermeer, which made the software product which was sold to Microsoft and became Microsoft FrontPage. A thoroughly useful book for the budding entrepreneur. Ferguson has written a book with quite a bit of the content oriented toward fellow business executives, especially those in a rapidly growing Internet startup. The sections on venture capital, the five things that the software company must do to succeed, and the contract negotiation sections were worth the price of the book alone. I recommend you read the first half, as that is where most of the content is, and if you really enjoyed the book and then go ahead and read the second half. The analysis of Netscape and Microsoft ending the book is mostly rehashed from the book, but is an interesting synopsis of his views anyhow. Highly recommended, because it offers technical business advice in a straightforward blunt manner that you won't find elsewhere. Strategies for Going Public: a 75 page book from Deloitte & Touche which summarizes what you need to do as a company executive to bring your company public, how the process works, and then how you will be running your company once you are public. I have read other books with similar information but this was the most concise and readable organization of the information I have seen. The only way to obtain this book is to contact Deloitte & Touche and request it. The New New Thing by Michael Lewis: The story of the man who created four billion dollar companies. You would think that the founder of SGI, Netscape, Healtheon and MyCFO would be an interesting, profound and highly motivated individual, and that much could be learned by reading about him. Jim Clark is none of these things. He is a very creative man who comes off in this book as a spoiled kid who must have his way and whose attention span can be measured in pico-seconds. His lack of an attention span is perhaps what has allowed him to create so many companies: because he becomes quickly uninterested in his creations, other people take them over and he is thus free to go start something else. I don't recommend reading this book, because it was a waste of time unless you enjoy reading about how millionaires blow money on pointless yacht projects. Andy Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive is a book that most people can skip reading. The grand theme of the book is that when a "Strategic Inflection Point" occurs in your line of business, things will be very difficult for you. The idea is similar to The Innovator's Dilemma, only not as well researched, argued or fine-tuned. The majority of the book is filled with common-sense management dictates, and 1/2 page "case studies" that read like a greatest-hits of big-business events of the past. I did enjoy the 5th chapter, which describes the months were top Intel management battled over corporate direction, whether to continue in the DRAM market, or to go after microprocessors. I also enjoyed the first chapter, which chronicles the crisis at Intel during the press orgy over the Pentium math bug. You might want to borrow this book to read just those two chapters, and skip the rest. The Open Sources book is a collection of essays from important figures in the open source movement. Most of the essays are dull and uninspired, but a few really stand out. Richard Stallman's article about the philosophy behind GNU, its goals and the early days of gcc were very interesting, and his challenge to the software industry, that the way it works is counter to human happiness and the good of mankind, was thought-provoking. Kirk McKusick's history of Unix is a quick, but useful overview. For a more extensive story of Unix, I recommend Peter Salus' short book A Quarter Century of Unix. Some of the attitudes presented in the book struck me as naïve. For example, while reading the introduction to Open Sources, I laughed out loud when I reached this paragraph: "Industry can have a negative impact on innovation. The Graphical Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) languished incomplete for a year at beta release 0.9. Its creators, two students at Berkeley, had left school to take jobs in industry, and left their innovation behind." Gosh, I suppose what they should have done was to ask Mom & Dad to pay for a few more years of open-source development, which is what Mom & Dad were doing when they were paying for the "free" programming time in college. I can just picture the conversation: "Dad, can I have $60,000 so that I can work without pay for two years, and then give away my two year's work for the good of mankind, or perhaps so that other companies, such as Red Hat, can have billion-dollar IPOs based on my labor?". At the end of the Open Sources book, a long mailing list discussion in the early days of Linux are reprinted, and these show an interesting debate of the relative merits of monolithic operating system kernels, versus micro-kernels. The Nudist on the Late Shift: A collection of short stories by Po Bronson, one of the masters of the genre of "Silicon Valley literature". This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, mostly without useful content except if you're looking to get the "flavor" of business in Silicon Valley. And for that contribution alone, it is worth reading, because the alternative is to read several years of Upside magazine to get a feel for the culture of Silicon Valley. Of course, I recommend you do both, and read Red Herring magazine as well. Note that a large number of the short stories in this book have already been published in other magazines such as Wired and Upside, so you may have (I had) already read half the book from other sources. Jerry Kaplan's Start Up is the story of "GO," a computer company which tried to create the market for pen-based computing. It is told from the perspective of the founder, and is fascinating if you are interested in how venture capital works, and in the way IBM conducts business. If money and power bore you, this isn't the book for you! This is the classic "silicon valley tale", which spawned the genre. A little out-of-date (since it's pre-Internet) but still very worthwhile.