The E-myth, why most businesses don't work and what to do about it

What Hacker News says

1. neyaFeb 2018
   Right off the bat, here you go:

   1. The 7 habits of highly successful people (Stephen Covey)

   2. The Miracle Morning (Hal Elrod)

   3. Business Model Generation (Aelxander Osterwalder)

   4. The Art Of War (Sun Tzu)

   5. The E-myth, why most businesses don't work and what to do about it (Michel Gerber)

   6. Made In Japan (Founder of Sony, Akio Morita)

   7. How to win friends and influence people (Dale Carnegie)

   Probably I missed a few more, but I think these ones are a good start.

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2. hgaSep 2016
   I strongly suggest reading The E Myth: Why Most Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, (https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Most-Businesses-Dont-About/dp/08...) or perhaps it's updated The E-Myth Revisited... (https://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abo...).

   Besides being fairly short, and having a lot of general good advice, such as, to use my own wording, making sure every essential hat is worn by someone, e.g. you probably won't start out with a CFO, but make sure one of the founders or earliest employees wears it, it goes into a thesis that you should write up a manual of how your business runs as if you were going to franchise it.

   Plenty of good justification for writing this up at some level of detail can be found in the other comments in this topic, although I'll admit the book is not oriented toward high tech businesses.

   But they're still businesses, and for that focus I highly recommend, probably after one or more books on customer development, which refine many of the ideas in it, Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur's Guide to Running a Successful Enterprise (https://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-High-Wire-Entrepren...). It's a story about a company that made and sold novel at the time discrete semiconductor devices, how they did their customer development, how they realized doing custom work for various customers was a loser, etc. It'll help reify what you'll read in good customer development books.

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