Some have suggested EA is too insular and needs to learn from other fields. In this vein, I think there are important mental models from the for-profit world that are underutilized by non-profits.
After all, business can be thought of as the study of how to accomplish goals as an organization—how to get things done in the real world. EA needs the right mix of theory and real world execution. If you replace the word “profit” with “impact”, you’ll find a large percentage of lessons can be cross-applied.
Eight months ago, I challenged myself to read a book a day for a year. I’ve been posting daily summaries on social media and had enough EAs reach out to me for book recs that, inspired by Michael Aird and Anna Riedl, I thought it might be worth sharing my all-time favorites here.
Below are the best ~50 out of the ~500 books I read in the past few years. I’m an entrepreneur so they’re mostly business-related. Bold = extra-recommended.
If you’d like any more specific recommendations feel free to leave a comment and I can try to be helpful.
Also—I’m hosting an unofficial entrepreneur meetup at EAG Bay Area. Message me on SwapCard for details or think it might be high impact to connect :)
A list of EA-relevant business books I’ve read
Some have suggested EA is too insular and needs to learn from other fields. In this vein, I think there are important mental models from the for-profit world that are underutilized by non-profits.
After all, business can be thought of as the study of how to accomplish goals as an organization—how to get things done in the real world. EA needs the right mix of theory and real world execution. If you replace the word “profit” with “impact”, you’ll find a large percentage of lessons can be cross-applied.
Eight months ago, I challenged myself to read a book a day for a year. I’ve been posting daily summaries on social media and had enough EAs reach out to me for book recs that, inspired by Michael Aird and Anna Riedl, I thought it might be worth sharing my all-time favorites here.
Below are the best ~50 out of the ~500 books I read in the past few years. I’m an entrepreneur so they’re mostly business-related. Bold = extra-recommended.
If you’d like any more specific recommendations feel free to leave a comment and I can try to be helpful.
Also—I’m hosting an unofficial entrepreneur meetup at EAG Bay Area. Message me on SwapCard for details or think it might be high impact to connect :)
The best ~50 books:
Fundraising:
Fundraising
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
Leadership/Management:
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
Entrepreneurship/Startups:
Running Lean
The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
Strategy/Innovation:
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don’t
Operations/Get Shit Done:
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow
Statistics/Forecasting:
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Writing/Storytelling:
Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know
Product/Design/User Experience:
The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
Psychology/Influence:
SPIN Selling (unfortunate acronym)
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Outreach/Marketing/Advocacy:
80⁄20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
How to learn things faster:
Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills
Personal Development:
The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
Atomic Habits
Recruiting/Hiring:
Recruiting
Who: The A Method for Hiring
Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World
Negotiating:
Negotiation Genius
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
Secrets of Power Negotiating: Inside Secrets from a Master Negotiator
Business Biographies:
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
If you’re not a book person, here are the best articles to read before launching a startup.
For more, here are 100 books that just missed the cut:
Fundraising:
Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms
The Art of Startup Fundraising: Pitching Investors, Negotiating the Deal, and Everything Else Entrepreneurs Need to Know
Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000
Operations/Get Shit Done:
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Leadership/Management:
The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business
High Output Management
First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
Statistics/Forecasting:
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Money, Health, and the Environment
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
How to Lie with Statistics
Entrepreneurship/Startups:
Make: learn to build profitable startups the indie way
Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
The 4-Hour Workweek
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup
High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People
From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue
The Minimalist Entrepreneur: How Great Founders Do More with Less
The Lean Marketplace: A Practical Guide to Building a Successful Online Marketplace Business
Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want
Zero to IPO: Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs
The Startup Playbook: Founder-to-Founder Advice From Two Startup Veterans
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Strategy/Innovation:
Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business
Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us
Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities
Writing/Storytelling:
The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase
The Addiction Formula (written about music, but you can cross-apply the ideas to writing)
Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is And What You Can Do About It
Product:
UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design
Lean UX
Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself
Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value
Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy
User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions
Psychology/Persuasion/Influence:
Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal
Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing
The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact
Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups
Outreach/Marketing:
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
Content Machine: Use Content Marketing to Build a 7-figure Business With Zero Advertising
Dotcom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online with Sales Funnels
How to learn things faster:
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer
Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
Personal Development:
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Hell Yeah or No: what’s worth doing
Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial
The 48 Laws of Power
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
Networking:
Never Eat Alone, and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships
How to Win Friends & Influence People
Business Biographies:
Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It (Mark Cuban)
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity
The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
Steve Jobs
Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
Reminder that you can listen to LessWrong and EA Forum posts like this on your podcast player using the Nonlinear Library.