Just 3 Books To Run Your Business
There are so many business books out there. People maintain long lists. Every day someone recommends a new one. It’s impossible to keep up. I decided to distill through them all and pick only three. The following are the top three books I’d recommend you and your teams to read to run your business.
These three books cover building cohesive teams, getting everyone one the same page, and creating a productive corporate culture. There are many other great books around sales management, product market fit, agile development, etc. These are all important but secondary to building good teamwork and a winning culture. You can have a great sales methodology, but if the company isn’t aligned on goals, it doesn’t matter.
Kim Scott summed up in a single book what it took me 20 years to learn, and a whole lot more. This book is the best how-to guid to being a manager that I’ve found. It is very accessible. You can read a chapter and apply the learning in your job the same day.
I especially like her guidelines for communication. Communicating with Radical Candor is “Caring Personally while Challenging Directly.” It’s amazing how many difficult subjects become easier to address once you have this framework. Also compelling is her guidelines about creating a culture that illicit bottom-up ideas from your teams, rather than a top-down approach which effectively neuters a vast majority of the smarts of an organization.
by Gino Wickman
This is the best book I’ve seen on creating a corporate mission and tracking goals/milestones as a team over time and in a palatable way. Its brilliance is in its simplicity. People can treat the creation of missions statements as arcane and complex. Traction demystifies the whole process. It even include simple templates, timelines and agendas you can fill out as a team to get the work done. No need for expensive consultants or overly complicated goal setting processes that nobody ever refers to again once completed.
Once you have your mission and core values, it also provides a framework to interview and rank prospective employees on whether they fit your core values. What good is it to have core values if nobody follows them? Once you have them, let’s make sure our people follow them as well.
By Patrick Lencioni
I put this book because it does the best job of describing how to create a culture built on trust in which the teams feel comfortable challenging each other. We all need to be challenged. And we all need to challenge our teammates, bosses and underlings. If politics and functional silos and bureaucratic inertia prevent us from doing that, our company will fail.
Its value is in its specificity and remedies. We all know teamwork is important. But what do you actually do when, say, two or more of your leaders have lost trust and won’t talk to each other. This book address is how do you rebuild that trust in those circumstances. At what point do you let a team member go who isn’t gelling with the rest of the team. The nitty gritty in these areas is why this book makes my top three.
I’d love to hear other top book recommendations you have whether they should displace one of my top three.
