Business success is about more than just having a good idea. As businesses grow, you need to adapt to the changing demands of your company. However, if you have already gotten your business off the ground it is too late to go back to school and relearn everything: you would not have the time. You need a book you can pick up and read in the few hours of downtime you scrape together every week.
To help facilitate this, we’ve compiled a listing of five must know books about business and getting organized, and specifically how to get organized at work. The insights of these authors should be enough to give you direction in growing your business.
1. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… and Why the Rest Don’t
Author: Verne Harnish
Author of the best-selling Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Harnish focuses on how to grow your business into an industry dominating force. His book breaks down important decisions into four sectors essential for any business: people, strategy, execution, and cash. The insights here are honed by decades of experience and will guide your company towards dominance.
2. Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard
Authors: Chip and Dan Heath
A successful business must be dynamic and able to adapt to changing times. Occasionally, the change that is needed opposes our better judgment, but when facts defy intuition, intuition must take a back seat. The authors explore stories of individuals from all walks of life: from lowly interns to managers, that showed how they implemented a change that pushed performance further than ever before. If you need to know how to change up the routine in your office, this book is the best resource for you.
3. The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business
Author: Patrick M. Lencioni
Lencioni proposes that what makes one business successful over another has nothing to do with gathering together triple-A talent or hard workers, but all about having a healthy organization. By setting organization and the objective as paramount, he proposes that your company will become wildly successful. It takes the time to establish a framework for organizational health and backs that up with anecdotes culled from years of experience. Ultimately, the secret to business success comes not from raw talent but maximizing potential and sound structure.
4. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Author: David Allen
Also known by the acronym GTD, Getting Things Done acted as one of the most influential books of its time. The book provides tips and techniques for enhancing productivity in both business and personal tasks. Through these techniques, you can be sure that you will squeeze more work into the scant few hours provided to us every day. GTD is a must-read for anybody looking to become even more useful to their company.
Read on: 15 Cult Business Blogs Everyone Should Read in 2017
5. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Author: Ed Catmull
Direct from one of the co-founders of the incredibly successful animation studio Pixar, known for some of the best-animated films of the past generation, Catmull provides tips for fostering creativity in a company. Creativity, Inc is a must-read for anybody who runs or works in a creative business: whether it is film, marketing, web development, application programming, video game development or any other creative industry. Catmull offers advice that utterly defies conventional thinking, and the proof of how effective these techniques are can be found in the studio’s filmography. From here the reader can learn how to build a business from the people who helped create their childhood.
These books have all stood the test of time, and have clawed their way to Amazon’s bestseller lists by providing well-informed insights from leaders in multiple industries. Actually, it’s these 5 books that the team at Scoro are encouraged to frequently read; enabling them to better discuss our products with prospective and existing clients. So read every one of them, absorb their lessons, and soon you too could find yourself with a wildly successful enterprise.
