Top 11 Books to Scale Your Business
Helpful Tools for Makers, Service Providers and Food Creators
You’ve likely discovered by this point in your business that the most valuable asset in your business is you. When you have the knowledge, insights and ideas you need when you need them you can grow and even scale your business. We want to make sure that when you do have a moment to sit down and read or listen to an audio book that it’s time well spent. Check out these books at your local library, using the free Libby App or find them at your local bookstore.
Book 1: The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier
What You’ll Learn About: Preparing to Manage Employees
Learn how to unlock your team’s potential through seven essential coaching questions. Learn how to get to the point in a conversation, how to get to the heart of challenges your team is facing and how to stay on track during one-on-one meetings.
Book 2: Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
What You’ll Learn About: Preparing to Manage Employees
Outlines how you can build a culture of trust in your team that allows for healthy conflict management, encourages commitment and accountability and a focus on results.
Book 3: Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu
What You’ll Learn About: Personal Development, Time Management
Even though women are half the workforce, they still represent only eighteen per cent of the highest level leaders. Dufu shares her personal experience of learning to reevaluate expectations, shrink her to-do list, and meaningfully engage the assistance of others―freeing the space she needed to flourish at work and to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships at home.
Book 4: Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
What You’ll Learn About: Product Development, Customer Feedback, Continuous Improvement
How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? In this book, you’ll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions.
Book 5: Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W.Chan Kim and Renee A.Mauborgne
What You’ll Learn About: Scaling and opening new markets, Product/Service Development in Emerging Spaces, Innovation
This book explains how lasting business success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans”–untapped new market spaces ripe for growth with numerous examples from businesses who have successfully carved out new market space.
Book 6: Extreme Ownership: How US Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
What You’ll Learn About: Personal Development, Leadership, Taking Responsibility, Decisive Action
Using examples from military and business leaders this book provides examples of how to prioritize, take responsibility for decisions both good and bad, how to keep ego in check and build camaraderie in your team and how to be decisive in your actions communicating across your team.
Book 7: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
What You’ll Learn About: Effective Team Meetings, Hosting Excellent Events
Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive–which they don’t have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. She provides examples of how a human-centered approach to gathering helps create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play.
Book 8: We Should All Be Millionaires by Rachel Rodgers
What You’ll Learn About: Financial goal setting, financial literacy, financial confidence
Rodgers will challenge you to change the way you think about money and your ability to earn it. In this book, Rachel Rodgers— a Black woman, mother of four, attorney, business owner, and self-made millionaire— shares the lessons she’s learned both in her own journey to wealth and in coaching hundreds of women through their own journeys to seven figures.
Book 9: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
What You’ll Learn About: Personal development, time management, productivity
Essentialism provides you with tools and strategies to combat the challenges of being stretched too thin, feeling overworked, busy but not productive and feeling like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas.
Book 10: The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Business Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E Gerber
What You’ll Learn About: Working on your business vs in your business
Dispels the myths about starting your own business, how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise and how to work on your business rather than just in your business.
Book 11: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Grenny, Patterson, McMillan, Switzler & Gregory
What You’ll Learn About: Team management, Leadership, Handling difficult conversations, conflict management
This book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person.
