Books

Entrepreneurs

Four Steps To The Epiphany

Successful Strategies for Products that Win. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.

Our thoughts

Important book paving the way for the "lean start-up" mentality

sales

Hope Is Not A Strategy

This book presents a proven, six-step process for winning sales opportunities and shows you how to: sell to a prospect's strategic business "pain" for greater value; qualify the prospect for forecasting accuracy; differentiate your solution to build competitive preference; link your strategy to the prospect's decision-making process; sell to power by finding the key to buyer politics; and communicate your strategy throughout your team

Our thoughts

Guide focussed on complex sales deals and how to manage them

Entrepreneurs

Zero To One

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1.

Our thoughts

How to think about fundamental innovation rather than just incremental innovation

Opportunity

Where to play

Where to Play helps you to set a promising strategy, by giving a clear, structured and practical framework - the Market Opportunity Navigator- to better identify, evaluate and focus on the right market opportunities. With three dedicated and reusable worksheets covering

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

Personal Development

Principles: Life + Work

The book's hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of "radical truth" and "radical transparency," include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams.

Our thoughts

Ray Dalio, "the Steve Jobs of investing" and "the philosopher king of the financial universe" (CIO magazine), is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you'll find in the conventional business press

Growth

Mastering The 7 Essentials Of High Growth Companies

The 7 Essentials-value proposition, high growth market segment, marquee customers, big brother alliances, exponential returns, inside/outside leadership, and essential board experts. This book is the timely answer to the search for what it will take to propel a company's growth through these challenging times. It's for management teams of any business, independent of size or industry, which desires to identify a course of action to improve their opportunities to grow.

Our thoughts

US centric book helpful for understanding expansion strategies

Scale up

Scaling Up Excellence

caling up excellence is the key to creating a great organisation. It’s how a small enterprise expands without losing focus. It’s how a brilliant new idea or plan developed by the few goes on to be adopted by the many. And, in hard times and tough situations, it’s how pockets of smart new thinking overcome cultures of indifference or negativity. An organisation that doesn’t know how to scale up what is best within it won’t achieve long-term success.

Our thoughts

Guide on how to expand and scale your business

sales

Sales Strategies

For those at senior management level, Sales Strategies illustrates the importance of integrating the firm's sales strategies with its corporate vision of the type of work it wants to perform. Case studies from an impressive array of blue-chip companies demonstrate real-life successes and serve to encourage the energy and commitment that is required from this demanding profession.

Our thoughts

Helpful insights into the key aspects of managing a powerful sales organisation

Business Model

Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense

This is a book for managers who know that their organisations are stuck in a mindset that thrives on fashionable business theories that are no more than folk wisdom, and whose so-called strategies that are little more than banal wish lists

Our thoughts

useful to demystify the hype around certain business models

Customer Engagement

Hooked

Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) with the Hook Model - a four-step process that, when embedded into products, subtly encourages customer behaviour. Through consecutive "hook cycles," these products bring people back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Our thoughts

A great read for those people out there seeking to better understand customer engagement

Productivity

Good To Great

he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good

Our thoughts

I use all of this for my offsite days in turnarounds - it's my go to book for everything. I've attached a few slides that I use regulalry for this

VC Investors

Venture Deals

Help take your startup to the next step with the new and revised edition of the popular book on the VC deal process—from the co-founders of the Foundry Group

Our thoughts

A useful reference book on what to look out for in the practical parts of running a start up

sales

The Sales Accelerator Formula

The Sales Acceleration Formula provides a scalable, predictable approach to growing revenue and building a winning sales team. Readers will learn how to apply data, technology, and inbound selling to every aspect of accelerating sales, including hiring, training, managing, and generating demand.

Our thoughts

Scalable and applicable approach for building a great sales team

sales

The Challenger Sale

What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships - and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.

Our thoughts

Excellent guide for customer centric sales approach

Entrepreneurs

The Solution Centric Organisation

The Solution-Centric Organization provides a comprehensive framework for moving companies away from a product/price orientation to a successful, solution-centric approach that includes sales, marketing, communication, and a problem-solving mentality.

Our thoughts

mentality shifting book focussed on getting to the right end result

Foundational

The $800 Million Pill

Goozner demonstrates that almost all the important new drugs of the past quarter-century actually originated from research at taxpayer-funded universities and at the National Institutes of Health. He reports that once the innovative work is over, the pharmaceutical industry often steps in to reap the profit.

Our thoughts

The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs

VC Investors

Term Sheets & Valuations

Term Sheets and Valuations provides information on term sheets and valuations. It covers topics such as defining and examining a term sheet, valuations, and East Coast and West Coast rules. In addition, it includes an actual term sheet from a leading legal firm with line-by-line descriptions of each clause; a discussion of what can and should be negotiated; and an explanation of the most important points

Our thoughts

his is a must-have book for any executive, entrepreneur, or financial professional.

VC Investors

Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur

This complete toolbook thoroughly details how venture capitalists arrange the financing for a company; what they look for in a business plan; how they value a business; and how they structure the terms of an agreement.

Our thoughts

Within its pages, you'll find everything you need to successfully raise new business capital with the most attractive terms possible.

sales

IT Sales Boot Camp

You'll be armed with such techniques as how to: Discover the SECRET value in a technology sale - Capture large buyers and win major deals - Communicate with highly informed, techo-savvy buyers - Adjust to a constantly changing market using advanced technology - Adapt to various needs by closing the GAP with buyersOffering far more than mere "basic training,"

Our thoughts

Useful for specific IT sales

Growth

Blueprint To A Billion

If you dream about growing your business to a billion, this is a fascinating down-to-earth study that you must read. Apply the seven essential principles to your business and you are off and running. Learn about strategy, growth, leadership, team building, and a whole lot more.

Our thoughts

Helpful growth guide

Entrepreneurs

Hard Thing About Hard Things

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.

Our thoughts

Ben Horowitz's book, essential reading for the silicon valley generation

Foundational

Understanding Pharma

The pharmaceutical industry is extremely complex, and so are the inner workings of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies operating within it. Even the most seasoned industry professionals may find it difficult to understand the activities of, and interdependencies among, all key functions within a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company.

Our thoughts

Yet this knowledge is crucial when the responsibilities for--or repercussions of--key initiatives ripple across an organization

VC Investors

Mastering The VC Game

A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms

Our thoughts

Great collection of interviews showing glimpses into the minds of some of the world's top VC investors

Business Model

Business Model Generation

It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Our thoughts

Seminal book on blue ocean thinking with actionable guide on how to make it happen

VC Investors

Deal Terms

The Finer Points of Venture Capital Deal Structures, Valuations, Term Sheets, Stock Options and Getting VC Deals Done (Inside the Minds)

Our thoughts

Deal Terms provides critical, in-depth, first-hand perspective on the crucial terms and factors which influence financing decisions

Lean

Lean Analytics

This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize your business, and how to spread the word

Our thoughts

Good step by step guide on how to validate and turn your idea into a reality

Leadership

Founders At Work

For would-be entrepreneurs, innovation managers or just anyone fascinated by the special chemistry and drive that created some of the best technology companies in the world, this book offers both wisdom and engaging insights straight from the source.

Our thoughts

Great selection of interviews with some of the best founders to have lived

Culture

The Fifth Discipline

In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nutured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are contually learning together. The Fifth Discipline fuses these features together into a coherent body of theory and practice, making the whole of an organisation more effective than the sum of its parts.

Our thoughts

Focussed creativity strategy within an organisation

Entrepreneurs

Scaling Up

This book is written so everyone 'from frontline employees to senior executives 'can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm. Scaling Up focuses on the four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash.

Our thoughts

Classic "how to" guide for general entrepreneurship]

Opportunity

The Second Bounce Of The Ball – Turning Risk Into Opportunity

Ronald Cohen, one of the world's leading private-equity investors, argues that the entrepreneur's aim is to take advantage of that uncertainty: for it is only in situations of uncertainty that significant gains can be made. Putting it another way, successful entrepreneurs know how to turn risk into opportunity.

Our thoughts

Helps you understand how to take advantage of a business opportunity the correct way

sales

The Sales Fox

Now Holden introduces the next step in the salesperson's professional evolution. Power Base Selling established the process for effectively engaging and defeating competition; The Selling Fox will show you how to fully execute that process. You'll not only fend off the competition; you'll de-install them from accounts, becoming the ultimate sales performer-the Selling Fox.

Our thoughts

Finding your champion to drive deals through

VC Investors

the secrets of sandhill road

Filled with scott Kupor's firsthand experiences, insider advice and practical takeaways.

Our thoughts

great overview of private investing

Talent aquisition

Who

n business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

Talent aquisition

The Rare Find

What great talent looks like and how to find it

Our thoughts

Seminal book on being able to spot and nurture future talent(s)

Creativity

Creativity, Inc.

Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Simple instructions, expert tips, templates, and images help you implement each tool or method.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

sales

The New Solution Selling

A practical guide designed to provide hands-on value to frontline salespeople as well as sales managers and executives, this step-by-step book shows you how to streamline the sales process by: understanding your buyers, their situations and, most importantly, their needs; supplying mutually defined solutions to your customers' recognized problems; gaining access to key decision makers; controlling the buying process; and, defining milestones that can be measured and forecasted

Our thoughts

Good sales optimisation guide, if a little dated..

Leadership

Patrick Lencioni Box Set

Patrick Lencioni’s inspiring stories, practical models, and actionable steps for organizational health, teamwork, leadership, and employee engagement have transformed individuals, teams, and companies worldwide. His compelling fables with powerful yet deceptively simple messages are written for anyone who strives to become an exceptional leader.

Our thoughts

Great framework and introduction to the organisational mind of Patrick Lencioni

Leadership

Selling To The C Suite

how to stand out and succeed in a market where executives are using social media and other technologies as a key part of their buying process

Our thoughts

Sales strategy book aimed at selling to senior management, helpful mentality insights

Leadership

The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team

Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team.

Our thoughts

Leadership stories with words of wisdom and warning

Product Design

The Design Thinking Toolbox

The Design Thinking Toolbox explains the most important tools and methods to put Design Thinking into action.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

sales

Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success

Drawing on a dizzying array of case studies and real-world examples, together with cutting-edge research on marginal gains, creativity and grit, Matthew Syed tells the inside story of how success really happens - and how we cannot grow unless we are prepared to learn from our mistakes.

Our thoughts

how to fully leverage marginal gains for elite performance

Productivity

Optimize

Optimize is designed to give readers a practical approach to integrating search and social media optimization with content marketing to boost relevance, visibility, and customer engagement. Companies, large and small, will benefit from the practical planning and creative content marketing tactics in this book that have been proven to increase online performance across marketing, public relations, and customer service.

Our thoughts

Great book showing how advantages such as social media can be best used

Data

The Visual Display of Quant Information

The classic book on statistical graphics, charts, tables. Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis.

Our thoughts

This book should be essential reading for anyone who relies on visually presenting quantitative information and is an absolute must in management consulting.

Growth

Profitable Growth

The coauthor of the international bestseller Execution has created the how-to guide for solving today's toughest business challenge: creating profitable growth that is organic, differentiated, and sustainable.

Our thoughts

A good book to provide some context in a complicated world and appreciating steady and "boring growth" for the blessing that it is

Leadership

Paid To Think

David Goldsmith presents his groundbreaking approach to leadership and management based on research revealing the twelve specific activities that all leaders perform on a daily basis, and he provides you with each activity’s accompanying tools and instructions proven to boost your performance and that of your entire organization

Our thoughts

Framework for a good leader

Personal Development

Bad Blood Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers

Our thoughts

John Carreyrou tells the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

Leadership

Start With Why

Why are some people and organizations more inventive, pioneering and successful than others? And why are they able to repeat their success again and again? Because in business it doesn't matter what you do, it matters why you do it.

Our thoughts

Good leadership book examining some of the greatest business leaders around

Product Design

The Design Thinking Playbook

This book describes how Design Thinking is applied across a variety of industries, enriched with other proven approaches as well as the necessary tools, and the knowledge to use them effectively. Packed with solutions for common challenges including digital transformation, this practical, highly visual discussion shows you how Design Thinking fits into agile methods within management, innovation, and startups.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

Leadership

Playing To Win

Strategy is not complex. But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future—something that doesn’t happen in most companies. Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.

Our thoughts

Good book on leadership and organisational health

Strategy

Blue Ocean Strategy

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.

Our thoughts

Seminal strategy book defining how to make competition irrelevant

Personal Development

The Emperor of All Maladies A Biography of Cancer

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out 'war against cancer'.

Our thoughts

he Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

Productivity

Execution

The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Our thoughts

Important business strategy book defining how people, strategy and operations intersect and interact

sales

Rethinking The Sales Cycle

n Rethinking the Sales Cycle, two leaders fromCustomerCentric Selling provide the latestresearch into the buying cycle. They present astep-by-step model that helps you seize marketshare and hold it by understanding the five stagesof the buying cycle

Our thoughts

Useful book for re-evaluating how your organisation thinks about sales cycles

sales

Spin Selling

Rackham went on to introduce his SPIN-Selling method. SPIN describes the whole selling process: Situation questions, Problem questions, Implication questions, Need-payoff questions.

Our thoughts

sales framework for the modern age

sales

Power Base Selling

The New Power Base Selling offers an updated and more in-depth edition of the original classic with an empirically based breakthrough to significantly increasing sales performance. It explains how competitive selling is as much a matter of politics, customer value, and strategy as it is a management science.

Our thoughts

How to find the right channels and the correct "power base" to get sales over the line

Marketing

Return On Influence

n this revolutionary book, renowned marketing consultant and college educator Mark W. Schaefer shows you how to use the latest breakthroughs in social networking and influence marketing to achieve your goals through

Our thoughts

Marketing for the modern age with a spin on social media

sales

Consultative Selling

Consultative Selling shows you how to move beyond looking at yourself as a vendor and instead partner with your clients, helping them to make profit-improving business decisions validated by their return on investment.

Our thoughts

Alternative framework for looking at your company as a vendor

Entrepreneurs

Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workwork

Unlocking key lessons and breaking down the steps, this book helps you delve deeper into the framework to get your business up and running with a greater chance for success. You'll find the tools you need to sharpen your instinct, engage your creativity, work through hardship, and give the people what they want—even if they don't yet know that they want it.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

sales

Selling With Ease

There are 4 distinct steps to every business transaction employed by all successful salespeople - and it's the understanding and execution of those 4 steps that separates the elite from the rest of the pack.

Our thoughts

Useful guide on sales cycles with actionable insights

Marketing

B2B Marketing Strategy

Filled with real-world case studies and practical, actionable insights, B2B Marketing Strategy takes the reader through three phases of thinking, doing and being different in order to make B2B marketing memorable in the hearts and minds of customers, creating lasting customer engagement.

Our thoughts

Good sales book focussed on how to manage a B2B strategy

Culture

Silos, Polictics And Turf Wars

The story is about Jude Cousins, an eager young management consultant struggling to launch his practice by solving one of the more universal and frustrating problems faced by his clients. Through trial and error, he develops a simple yet ground-breaking approach for helping them transform confusion and infighting into clarity and alignment.

Our thoughts

A cut to the bone guide on organisational politics

Productivity

User Story Mapping

User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it. This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features.

Our thoughts

Helpful guide for technical teams not to get lost in the weeds and keep focussed on the end goal

sales

The Perfect Salesforce

How any company can build an incredibly effective salesforce by learning from the best in the world

Our thoughts

Case studies regarding best sales force practices

B2B

Content That Converts

This book is for entrepreneurs and the leaders of B2B businesses who want to use content marketing to bring a predictable stream of qualified leads into their sales cycles, and need a replicable system to make it happen.

Our thoughts

Provides a system and framework for building B2B relationships

Personal Development

A Cure Within

Based entirely on interviews with the investigators, this book is the story of the immuno-oncology pioneers. It's a story of failure, resurrection, and success. It's a story about science, it's a story about discovery, and intuition, and cunning. It's a peek into the lives and thoughts of some of the most gifted medical scientists on the planet.

Our thoughts

If this book motivates even one more similarly talented and visionary investigator to deliver on their promise it would be a wonderful success.

Leadership

The DNA Of High Performance Teams

LEADER BOARD: THE DNA OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE TEAMS answers the crucial question facing today’s leaders: how to understand and unleash the potential of their team’s DNA faster and more effectively than ever before

Our thoughts

Leadership book focussed on team optimisation, generally useful for building your mental framework

sales

The Ultimate Sales Machine

Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies

Our thoughts

A good guide on how to optimise and get the best out of a sales organisation

Leadership

The Five Temptations Of A Ceo

Refreshingly original and utterly compelling, this razor-sharp novelette plus self-assessment (written to be read in one sitting) serves as a timeless and potent reminder that success as a leader can come down to practicing a few simple behaviors that are painfully difficult for each of us to master. Any executive can learn how to recognize the mistakes that leaders can make and how to avoid them.

Our thoughts

Leadership stories and the original bestseller, great book

Scale up

Winning

It clearly lays out the answers to the most difficult and important questions people face both on and off the job. Welch's optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set is riveting.

Our thoughts

An ode to Jack Welsh (ex-CEO for GE)

Productivity

Sprint

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint.

Our thoughts

THE BOOK for intense bursts of work to solve specific problems

Customer Engagement

The Customer Centricity Playbook: Implement a Winning Strategy Driven by Customer Lifetime Value

In this new book, Fader and Toms offer a true playbook for companies of all sizes that want to create and implement a winning strategy to acquire, develop, and retain customers for the greatest value.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

Customer Engagement

The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

Entrepreneurs

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply.

Our thoughts

Aiming for Early Stage spin-outs

sales

How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale

Stein shows readers how to plan strategically for scenarios when details are most important-so they never come up short in the eyes of a client.

Our thoughts

Helpful sales guide for building a repeatable sales strategy

Data

Envisioning Information

The book provides practical advice about how to explain complex material by visual means, with extraordinary examples to illustrate the fundamental principles of information displays. Topics include escaping flatland, color and information, micro/macro designs, layering and separation, small multiples, and narratives.

Our thoughts

This is a book about how to lay out information which is full of beautiful information.... It's that simple and yet it is a complex and thought provoking book

sales

Major Account Sales Strategy

Knowing how to get to the decision maker, deal with the competition, understand buyer psychology, and service the client--these are the keys to success when you need to nail down major accounts

Our thoughts

Focussed book on larger sales transactions

sales

Insight Selling

n Insight Selling, Schultz and Doerr share the surprising results of their research on what sales winners do differently, and outline exactly what you need to do to transform yourself and your team into insight sellers. They introduce a simple three-level model based on what buyers say tip the scales in favor of the winners

Our thoughts

Sales mentality guide

Lean

The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late.

Our thoughts

The original book and essential reading for modern entrepreneurs

sales

World Class Selling

The concepts put forth in World Class Selling, created by linking critical sales and sales-related areas of a business, will drive any company's ability to change as market circumstances change.

Our thoughts

Fact based case studies for a great sales organisation

Leadership

Escape Velocity

Geoffrey Moore’s now-classic Crossing the Chasm became a must-read book by presenting an innovative framework to address the make-or-break obstacle facing all high-tech companies: how to gain market share from early adopters and from mainstream consumers.

Our thoughts

Good sense check book on how to evolve a company with to the world around it

VC Investors

Valuation in Life Sciences

The purpose of the book is to explain how to apply discounted cash flow and real options valuation to life sciences p- jects, i.e. to license contracts, patents, and firms.

Our thoughts

Valuation is a hot topic among life sciences professionals.

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