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As a technical founder this book on negotiation was highly valuable: "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It". Negotiation is a skill you need as a startup founder that is not necessarily needed for technical work. "Innovators Dilemma" - helps put in perspective acceptable state of early products and good strategies for deploying new innovative products
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that Voss's work as an FBI negotiator negated a lot of his advice. With the FBI, the building is surrounded, and the criminal is forced to negotiate with him. There are no alternatives, and there's a threat of violent action being taken against the criminal if the negotiations are refused or dont go the way Voss wants. In business, the person on the other side has alternatives and they can walk away at any…
I dropped it about 2/3 through because too much of it was reading as plainly-bullshit. "I got a great deal on my truck by just saying 'how can I do that?' over and over! Here's how it went!" LOL, no you didn't, and no it didn't, and now I'm wondering whether literally any of your other stories were even a little true. I got a very little bit out of it, but the useful bit could have been a blog post. The rest was egot…
1. "Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company" by Andrew Grove. It is a real CEO experiencing critical moments in a top company.
2. "How Life Imitates Chess" by Garry Kasparov (don't pay attention to the title...). Kasparov talks about different players with different styles and in different moments.
3. "New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics" edited by Thomas Tymoczko. Embed epistemological questions that at a higher level could be applied to business. In a way (2) is epistemological regarding chess and it ends when Deep Blue beats Kasparov and Kasparov start thinking in a new kind of chess called advanced chess (even if it was not successful).
4. Fred Wilson's blog, including MBA Mondays. Answers many questions from the perspective of a VC who can watch multiple companies execution at the same time and tell many humble stories.
5. "Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft" by Paul Allen. It shows you the deep story before Microsoft, seems like a unique technological and advanced experience at that time by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Spoiler: the lucky IBM/DOS event is not why Microsoft is successful, the book gives you some deep roots before the company foundation.
Founder of a bootstrapped 17 year-old SaaS company here. I've read countless books on this topic. The book that helped me the most was "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. It has memorable nuggets of advice, summarised neatly into insightful chapters. Once you learn these nuggets you never forget them, and you end up leveraging them regularly in your day-to-day entrepreneurial decisions. It's a bit like Covey's 7 Habits b…
1. "Lean Startup" (pretty standard) 2. "Spin Selling" (sales) 3. "The Four-Hour Work Week" (not because of the way of life promised in the misleading title, but because of the links to useful Websites, and for motivational reading) 4. "The One Billion Dollar App" (silly title but fantastic book from an actual taxi app product manager - I almost didn't buy it because of the title, thank God I opened it anyway and star…
Spin Selling: Situation Problem Implication Need-payoff, or The Spin Selling Fieldbook: Practical Tools, Methods, Exercises and Resources?
Founder of a bootstrapped 17 year-old SaaS company here. I've read countless books on this topic. The book that helped me the most was "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. It has memorable nuggets of advice, summarised neatly into insightful chapters. Once you learn these nuggets you never forget them, and you end up leveraging them regularly in your day-to-day entrepreneurial decisions. It's a bit like Covey's 7 Habits b…
Do you have an example nugget that stuck with you?
I at first assumed this book was just its title, and was some combination of 'launch to a lot of people in a narrow space' plus 'personal value precedes network value'.
There's actually a lot more in it, especially about the granularity of scaling at uber.
For me the book landed after I'd already tried and failed to start a network by onboarding individuals. The 'atomic networks' stuff in there is gold. (Though for someone like me who learns through failure, I needed to try everything else before the message landed).
As a technical founder this book on negotiation was highly valuable: "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It". Negotiation is a skill you need as a startup founder that is not necessarily needed for technical work. "Innovators Dilemma" - helps put in perspective acceptable state of early products and good strategies for deploying new innovative products
In real life, especially when you're younger than 60 and in business, every negotiation is part of an iterated game -- you are, much more than negotiating any single deal / job offer / contract term, figuring out who you want to work with, making friends and allies and partners along the way.
In those terms, most of that book is toxic, or at least sociopathic. That's fine if your only job is to get terrorists to put away their guns. But, it's definitely less fine if you are cutting a deal with someone who you will definitely intersect with multiple times in your life. And that's most people, it turns out. :)
Anyway, I think the book is super interesting, but I think technical types or those with a bit of ASD may find the relational approach hurts them more than winning any particular negotiation.