
Chris Guillebeau, The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future, 2012
In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose – and earn a good living. This is an easy-to-use guide, where there are the most valuable lessons from those who have learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment. It is all about finding the intersection between your “expertise” – even if you do not consider it such – and what other people will pay for. You do not need an MBA, a business plan or even employees. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.
Fraser Doherty MBE, 48-Hour Start-up: From idea to launch in 1 weekend, 2017
Fraser Doherty’s 48-Hour Start-Up is your handy and essential cheat sheet to starting your own business giving the key steps for developing an idea and getting it to market quickly. Almost everyone dreams of starting their own business but very few do. But what if it only had to be a decision of a weekend and it didn’t cost a fortune?
Gary Vaynerchuk, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World, 2013
If you struggle with social media and you want to learn how to use it effectively to market your business, then this is the book for you. ary Vaynerchuk is a rockstar on social media. His energetic writing style in Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is exactly what’s needed when talking about this increasingly important subject. “Jabs are the lightweight pieces of content that benefit your customers by making them laugh, snicker, ponder, play a game, feel appreciated, or escape; right hooks are calls to action that benefit your businesses.”In plainer terms: “Jab, jab, jab, jab, jab . . . right hook! Or . . . Give, give, give, give, give . . . ask.”The book goes through 80+ detailed case studies from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, with fresh strategies that work along with great tips on execution. Follow in Gary’s footsteps and take your social media game to the next level: grow your Instagram following to 50k by learning how I did it here, or learn how to boost traffic to your blog using the power of Pinterest.
Joel Gehman, Jean-François Soublière, Cultural Entrepreneurship: From Making Culture to Cultural Making, 2016
It is a summary of three perspectives on cultural entrepreneurship (CE). Originating in sociology, CE 1.0 focuses on making culture, or the processes by which high culture organizations and popular culture products are created. With roots in strategic management and organization theory, CE 2.0 focuses on deploying culture, or the processes by which culture constitutes a toolkit for legitimating new ventures. The authors interpret recent scholarship as suggesting the emergence of a third wave, CE 3.0, which emphasizes cultural making, the distributed and intertemporal processes whereby value is created across multiple and fluid repertoires and registers of meaning. They close by speculating on two issues: the performativity of cultural entrepreneurship, and the cult of entrepreneurship.
Michael Lounsbury, Mary Ann Glynn, Cultural Entrepreneurship, 2019
This Element provides an overview of cultural entrepreneurship scholarship and seeks to lay the foundation for a broader and more integrative research agenda at the interface of organization theory and entrepreneurship. Its scholarly agenda includes a range of phenomena from the legitimation of new ventures, to the construction of novel or alternative organizational or collective identities, and, at even more macro levels, to the emergence of new entrepreneurial possibilities and market categories. Michael Lounsbury and Mary Ann Glynn develop novel theoretical arguments and discuss the implications for mainstream entrepreneurship research, focusing on the study of entrepreneurial processes and possibilities.
Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, 2014
The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, 2008
As entrepreneurs, we need to learn how to be leaders. This is because no man is an island unto himself and no business succeeds alone. You’ll need to build a tribe of loyal supporters. You’ll need the ability to inspire others, both your clients and your employees if you want your business to make a difference.Tribes is filled with examples that show us how leadership depends on your ability to inspire others. The first step? Shifting your mindset from being passive to proactive. You are here to make things happen, not to wait for things to happen.Though Seth Godin doesn’t share a step-by-step guide with Tribes (since every situation is different), he does teach you how to spot opportunities to take leadership positions. It’s up to you to get out there and find them for yourself.
Shane Snow, Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking, 2016
This book does a fantastic job of analyzing the lives of incredibly successful people and companies who have done amazing things in implausibly short amounts of time. Shane Snow illustrates what a “smartcut” or smart shortcut is, using lessons from both ancient history and recent years. Find out what tricks and strategies the best of the best use to achieve lasting success—fast. These lessons take down old myths about success and how to get there, showing how you can achieve incredible results by working smarter, not harder.
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, 2012
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is a must-read manifesto for anyone with a creative job or business.Regardless of your craft or where you aspire to go with it, the goal of this book is to help you overcome the internal resistance us creative people know all too well. This resistance gets in the way, slows us down, and prevents us from realizing our true creative potentials —like a war going on inside of our heads.If your business or career involves innovation, ingenuity, or the creative process, you should prepare yourself for that internal war by reading The War of Art, and come out of the fray victorious.
