I’m a voracious reader and glean a ton of useful knowledge from books. From this foundation, I often apply the knowledge I’ve gained from reading case studies, research, blogs, experiments, and books to my work and can connect disparate ideas that address unique situations effectively.
One of my favorite things about business school was learning through case studies. Each one offered a new insight into how to digest and respond to unique business challenges and this has sharpened my ability to apply business frameworks I’ve learned over the years.
Below I’ve listed a selection of business books that pertain to marketing, SaaS, lean/agile processes and strategy that I’ve read cover to cover along with a blurb about what I took away from them. Enjoy!
The Lean Startup
Combining much of the Five Steps to Epiphany’s customer development premise and agile software development into a feedback loop, Eric Ries lays out what is essentially the framework for the Lean Startup. Hypothesis testing and putting a premium on learning from your efforts are tenets you should not ignore. Those in larger organizations will also benefit from his methodology for applying Lean Startup principles into more mature companies. Read it and apply what you learn in your work.
Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
A great companion to lean startup marketing books, Traction walks you through a framework to identify the best marketing channels for your company in a systematic fashion. It cites how many startups often miss out on more effective channels because of experience bias or industry knowledge of where marketing efforts exist, much like the Curse of Knowledge I’ve written about. Best practices and concrete examples of ways to test the traction within a channel are discussed. The nineteen traction channels covered run the gamut from display ads to engineering as marketing and speaking engagements. A really good read for any business seeking… traction.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
A friend thought this book described me well and recommended this book to me. David Epstein published it in 2019, arguing that generalists — those who explore a broad range of interests and skills — are more likely to excel in complex and unpredictable environments. Dabbling in multiple fields and specialties can unlock unique and game-changing progress. Epstein’s insights are even more relevant today as our world turns to a more AI-driven one. While AI excels at specialized tasks, it still struggles to integrate knowledge effectively across domains and creative thinking — areas where generalists shine.
Crossing the Chasm & Inside the Tornado
Geoffrey Moore writes how you must position and market your product differently depending on its lifecycle in these books. As your customer’s adoption traits change, you need to change your approach to grow your solution into a mass-market success. If you like strategy discussions be sure these two books end up on your bookshelf or in your digital library.
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy
This timeless book published in 1999 was one of the first books I read about applying strategy to information in an internet-connected world. Much of what now is considered common knowledge, like network effects, was really at the forefront of economics at the time. Most of the main points are still valid today. The book discusses the importance of switching costs and lock-in. Interestingly, when you flip the concept on its head, I believe this is what paved the way for SaaS products to be so successful. Lowering the risk of switching costs and mitigating lock-in has significantly increased the adoption of SaaS.
Four Steps to the Epiphany
This book may be full of typos and grammatical errors but for me, there probably isn’t a more important book in shaping my career. Spawning the Lean Startup methodology (now recognized by Harvard), Steve Blank walks you through how customer development is the key to creating a successful product. Get outside the building and validate your ideas and prove them in the market. Priceless.
Running Lean & Scaling Lean
Ash Maurya truly practices what he preaches by applying the Lean Startup methodology to his writing. I was able to read along as he self-published his work in progress. He incorporated the feedback from this period to tighten up and go into more depth with his O’Reilly Media published version. His insights are specific and practical to use. I especially appreciate the detail he goes into providing a step-by-step framework to validate market needs. Scaling Lean is an excellent resource to better understand and implement frameworks to the product solution, product-market fit, and scaling stages of your product development life cycle.
Contagious
I really enjoyed this look at what types of content are shared and go viral. Applying the STEPPS to content is a great way to juice up exposure to your marketing. Share something that gives you or someone else **(S)**ocial credibility, possesses frequent **(T)**riggers to think of it, elicits the right **(E)**motion, is visible and shared in **(P)**ublic, possesses **(P)**ractical value, and brings a **(S)**tory telling narrative that acts as a vessel for spreading.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
I was fortunate enough to be exposed to this in my Consumer Behavior course while pursuing my MBA at Kenan-Flagler. Robert Cialdini is a PhD. graduate of UNC and world renown for his work on the science of persuasion. This is my favorite book on the subject and really stands out for its thorough assessment and inclusion of pertinent studies in the field. If you are a marketer, you should read this book.
Copywriting Books: Web Copy That Sells, Ca$hvertising, Kopywriting, Words That Sell, The Boron Letters
When it comes to marketing, copywriting is monumentally important. These books offer different, but useful approaches to ensure your copywriting and tactical page elements work to communicate and drive action. In addition to these books, I also recommend following CopyHackers and Copy Blogger online.
Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?
One of many great Seth Godin books, this one is a great primer on the benefit of embracing new trends in marketing. If you need to convince others why a shift of your marketing budget from traditional channels to new channels, this book will give you plenty of examples and trends which should make your argument more convincing.
Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small
Get your creative juices flowing. By using techniques in this book, you can generate ideas upon ideas that could become game-changers. This book is particularly useful for structuring group creativity sessions.
Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
Avinash Kaushik wrote this excellent book that dives deep into best practices of capturing and using web analytics. While this book is a bit wordy at times, it goes beyond analytics and metrics and helps practitioners discover business insights.
The Lean Entrepreneur
Simply one of the best books on what the Lean Startup is and how to implement it. The book does a good job of bringing in lots of different lean startup philosophies. If you are at a startup or thinking about starting one, get this book.
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
Another great book from Chip and Dan Heath, this book uncovers common pitfalls to decision making and how to overcome them. The WRAP model presents how we can **(W)**iden our options, **(R)**eality test our assumptions, **(A)**ttain distance before deciding, and **(P)**repare ourselves to be wrong to make better decisions. I particularly like the concept of “ooching” — conducting small experiments to test a hypothesis.
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
Michael Porter introduces his famous five forces framework, the primary competitive strategies (cost leadership, differentiation, niche focus), strategies geared to specific market or industry types. While this book is more than 30 years old and can be wordy at times, it is the best book on the market for strategy. It gives you insights into where opportunities exist in markets and is a must-read for anyone struggling with developing their revenue model.
Flawless Consulting
Peter Block may have written the first version of this book three decades ago, but it still is one of the most useful books on how to approach consulting available. Understanding how important the “soft stuff” can be and setting expectations for a client engagement upfront really helps ensure the consulting engagement is successful. While this is aimed at consultants, the guts are really applicable to all knowledge workers who engage in projects.
Obviously Awesome
Product marketers unite! Newbies and experts would be wise to pick up this practical guide to nail product positioning from April Dunford. The book illustrates how assessing foundational components of your product and the looking at the market landscape it will play in can make your product stand out as, well, obviously awesome. My favorite takeaway is centered around the market categorization assessment and how you can use inherent beliefs and expectations of the market category you choose to play in to achieve better results.
Positioning
Despite its age, Positioning still remains relevant to product marketers today. With great insight and anecdotes around product positioning flops and successes, this book really shines in its delivery of how to approach product line extensions and considerations for comparing your product to competitors.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Great book about how and why we remember things. Marketers will find this book very helpful in communicating ideas that stick. Brothers Chip and Dan Heath lay out concepts you intuitively know will work, but when combined with one another spark inspiration and clarity that will make your marketing messages memorable. Messages that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories are stickier.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
My first foray into Malcolm Gladwell’s work and the first of many of his books I’ve read. This book attempts to explain what causes a message to go from little known to mainstream. Marketers would be wise to read this book when crafting a word-of-mouth campaign that identifies the type of people to focus your efforts on.
Outliers
This book is an interesting look at how seemingly unimportant characteristics of your environment can shape your path in life. Example after example demonstrate how success stories often point to an important environmental factor that opens the door to related success.
Five Dysfunctions of a Team
A fun read in fable format, Patrick Lencioni has written a winner with this work. If you are in a larger organization or coming into a dysfunctional team environment this book will help turn your team around. My key takeaway was that encouraging constructive conflict can really benefit teams if done in a productive way.
Don’t Make Me Think!
This book boils down to testing for actions you want target customers to carry out. The ultimate test: if a key action you want someone to make isn’t obvious to them, then you need to iterate so this action becomes frictionless. Get in front of customers and make sure your message and actions you want them to take are immediately recognized.
Built to Last & Good to Great
Written on the questions raised from Built to Last, Jim Collins and his team of researchers tried to make the acclaimed Good to Great more actionable. Understanding how some larger companies stay relevant and others decline, even in the same industry, is a tough nut to crack. My key takeaway is developing a corporate culture and aligning your hiring with employees who fit well within your culture.
Small is the New Big
Essentially a collection of Seth Godin blog posts, this one will get you thinking. What I took from this book is how important focus can be in growing your business — positioning and selling a narrow product to a big market or a more robust product to a niche market.
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
Robert Cialdini has done it again. His most recent book covers more recent research on influence in the context of unconscious, indirect, environmental tactics you can use to influence outcomes. One of my favorites concepts in the book is setting the stage for an ultimate ask by first asking a more innocuous question.
Predictably Irrational
I was fortunate enough to take Dan Ariely’s course on Irrationality on Coursera. There are so many potential uses for ways that business can employ the knowledge imparted from his book, you’d be irrational not to pick it up. One of my favorite anecdotes is regarding purchasing habits when faced with choices — don’t paralyze customers with too many options unless you want more dissatisfied customers and fewer sales.
Spin Selling
Neil Rackham’s books take you through his methodologies to sell. In Spin Selling you are introduced to Rackham’s Situation, Problem, Identification, Need-payoff strategy of selling. If you are trying to sell to large companies, the techniques in these books can help you land these types of accounts.