About how to start your own business. If you want – in parallel with your main job. And how to improve your existing business, or rather – your views on it. So you can have all the freedom you’ve ever had.

About what the optimal size of the company is, why it should grow, what and how you should really plan and whether you should learn from your mistakes. And about many other familiar and unexpected things.

The book is written by practitioners. Jason Fryde and David Heinemeier Hensson are highly successful Internet entrepreneurs who founded the legendary 37signals. A company of 14 employees whose products are used by over three million people worldwide!

Read in one breath. Clears all doubts on the distant approaches. It’s inspiring. Confusing. Takes you out of your comfort zone. And gives a useful practical base.

You had no idea business could be like that.

“Scratch the surface and you find that the inhabitants of the ‘real world’ are filled with pessimism and despair. Worse, they want to drag the rest of us into their grave, too. If you are full of hope and ambition, they will try to convince you that realizing your ideas is impossible. They will tell you that you are wasting your time. Don’t believe them. Such a world may be real to them, but that doesn’t mean you have to live in it.”

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In his book, Tony Shay talks about the lessons he has learned in building and developing several successful businesses and about his philosophy of life.

What is happiness? What is success? What do I work for?

These were the questions Tony Shay pondered after selling LinkExchange. The deal with Microsoft allowed the author to live the rest of his days in pleasure and not work another day. He could afford to buy a house in the most upscale neighborhood of San Francisco, spend weekends in Las Vegas, and play casinos there not for the money, but to win.

Shay decided to create a list of things that made him truly happy and found that none of the items were about money. He felt happy when he played with his classmates during his high school years and when he was happy about simple things like hanging out with friends until dawn and seeing the sunrise. According to the author, one of the main problems of modern society is the equal sign that most people put between happiness and money.

Mankind was on the cusp of a changing millennium, and the world was undergoing dramatic changes due to the rapid growth of the Internet. You couldn’t stay away and just make money, especially if you already had more than enough of it.

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What most business leaders may not know is that Kim and Mauborgne’s theoretical framework, models and tools for creating a new marketplace were first published in the Harvard Business Review in a series of breakthrough articles that changed the way strategy and its implementation were understood. Challenging conventional wisdom, the articles questioned the concept of competition as a key element of strategy. These articles argue that direct competition leads to imitation of strategy and limits the space for profit opportunities. In order to ensure profitable growth, companies must free themselves from competition by entering a radically new market.

All of these articles served as the basis for the development of the approach that became known over time as the blue ocean strategy.

This book brings all the publications together-along with the articles that Kim and Mauborgne published in the Harvard Business Review as part of a further development of ideas related to blue ocean strategy after the first edition was published. Readers will find here the basic concepts and tools of blue ocean strategy in their original form.

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The book is about how to make your business unique, how to form an exclusive offer that your customers can not refuse.

Mike Mickalowitz uses an unusual “farming” methodology, the “Pumpkin Method” step-by-step strategy, which is based on analyzing the quality of a product or service, evaluating and ranking customers, planning financing, and selecting prospects.

The main goal is to make a profit and gain a leadership position.

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“Never been an entrepreneur in your life? Don’t know where to get startup capital? Great! Now’s your chance to get it right,” is how Michael Mickalowitz motivates his readers. Complex concepts from the business world are laid out in simple and clear language with a touch of humor, which makes the book a real find for both first-time entrepreneurs and more experienced businessmen.

Many people who want to start their own business and succeed in it, stops lack of a large initial capital. Most believe that without a good investment their business will not develop. Mike Michalowitz’s book, Startup Without a Budget, teaches you that 3 sheets are enough to have a successful business career. The 10 facts in the book will convince you that you need to read it in its entirety and go achieve business heights.

Mike is a serial businessman, first computer assembly company sold when he was 24. The second, a no-name company, sold to some national player, then a third and a fourth.

A few years ago, when I read this book I thought the whole point could be summed up in two pages – set a goal, go for it with bulldozer tenacity and save on everything you can. To the point of stinginess, to the point of paranoia, to the point of notes on the back of paper already used. But then there was the boom of personal brands and success stories. You know, the whole: wipe out two months and buy a Ferrari or you’re not worth anything. Or open 100,500 branches in a week and travel around the country with training. And I rethought the book.

There’s a cool point about Zuckerberg, Brin and Bezos getting on the media radar and becoming role models just because their story is out of the ordinary and you personally have a 0.01% chance of repeating it. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive to be like Zuckerberg, you just have to remember that it won’t work at the first time, and it probably won’t work at the 10th time either. You have to fall down, get up, and keep going. You have to persevere, but not confuse it with manic idiocy.

It may seem simple, but in the early days of social networking I remember very well the number of orders for programmers that started with the words to clone Facebook. People were seriously convinced that if Durov did it, they could do it. This blind copying of successful models is what Mike warns against in his book “Startups Without a Budget.

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The book analyzes the experiences of companies that have made the transition from good performance to outstanding, such as: Abbott, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, Wells Fargo. These companies have maintained strong results for 15 years. For example, by 2000, the $1 investment made in 1965 in these companies would have increased 471 times, while investment in the stock of all companies in the market would have increased only 56 times.

The research team, led by Jim Collins, examines the factors and conditions necessary for the transition “from good to great” and its mechanisms. The authors are convinced that consistent implementation of the ideas and concepts outlined in the book will help almost any organization dramatically improve its performance and achieve truly outstanding results.

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