BOOK SPECIAL...... READ TO GET AHEAD

READ TO GET AHEAD

Here are four books that business leaders recommend to help you advance in your career

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

The author drives home the need to minimize politics in the workplace. Office politics can cause rifts within organisations, and distract employees from doing their best work. In order to prevent office politics, each company must create a promotion policy that all understand. Horowitz suggests that each position within the company have a clear job description that includes skills required to be successful in the role. Furthermore, he recommends that promotions be reviewed by a special committee to avoid inter department misalignment.

High Output Management by Andrew Grove

While he was CEO of Intel, Andy Grove published a seminal work of business management advice, High Output Management. It has received glowing reviews from the Wall Street Journal and from Peter Drucker, a well-known business writer. Grove provides ample advice for senior managers. He says that the manager’s job is to leverage his business acumen by improving the performance of his subordinates. This is the key difference between an individual contributor and a manager. A manager uses subordinates as a productivity multiplier.

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore

The author presents business leaders with a framework for taking a product or service from those early adopters to the early majority. The best way to break into mainstream markets, he writes, is by focusing on a narrow group of prospective customers that can act as reference customers within specific industries. By winning over a few influential anchor customers, it will be considerably easier to win over similar businesses.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” This is a key takeaway of Eric Ries’s bestselling book, The Lean Startup. Ries is the former cofounder and CTO of IMVU, which hit a $40 million run rate in 2010. Ries argues that the best way to develop a product or service is to focus on finding product-market fit as quickly as possible. To do this, he suggests developing a series of minimum viable products (MVPs), which are rough examples of what a more polished version of the product or service could look like.

businessinsider.in

ET 11JAN19