Media Query Source: Part 36 Connecticut Innovations (US state venture capital newsletter)My recommended book for entrepreneurs"The Lean Startup"All bu
The responses I provided to a media outlet on February 20, 2022:
Media: Best business books for leaders.
Media: Entrepreneurs are short on time. If you could recommend one business book that should be on every entrepreneur's must-read list, what would it be and why do you recommend it?
Gfesser: My recommendation is "The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses", by Eric Ries, Crown Business, 2011. As a prolific book reviewer, Amazon had sent me a pre-publication uncorrected proof of this book for my review in 2011, which not only introduced me to the concept of the minimum viable product ("MVP") at that time, but also provided substantive maturity to the product approach my colleagues and I had already started using several years prior to build a healthcare product, an approach I've continued to use ever since.
Every business offering can be viewed as a product, even services which lack the properties of traditional products, such as consulting. I've noticed that many business books still don't discuss the product approach to business offerings, often still clinging to projects which are planned for specific time durations. The author provides a good introduction to the application of Lean principles, which seek to eliminate any waste that does not add value to the end customer. Lean enables entrepreneurs to determine what customers want during product development to help minimize wasted efforts when rolling out products to the marketplace.
In the midst of his presentation, Ries provides a particularly good quote by Peter Drucker: "there is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." He furthers this thought by explaining that most people believe projects are inherently failure prone, that a more careful, slowed down process will reduce the failure rate, and perhaps a small, select group of people just happen to have the innate gift of knowing what to build the first time around. The author explains these approaches as relics of nineteenth century management practices, and as I've witnessed firsthand the continued use of these approaches in the current century, I continue to highly recommend this book for the entrepreneur's bookshelf.
See all of my responses to media queries here.