The Reading List

Michael E. Gerber (1995)

The book that named the divide between working in the business and working on it. The chapter names it The E-Myth and adds: “I learned that lesson the hard way, years before I ever read the book.”

Rita Gunther McGrath (2019)

Where the word inflection point comes from: the shift big enough to throw your settled assumptions into question. Her earlier The End of Competitive Advantage (2013) is the companion.

Clayton M. Christensen (1997)

Names the pattern where your best product blocks the next harbor.

Chet Holmes (2007)

The chapter says it outright: “If you haven't read it, put it on your list.” Holmes's Core Story is where the Prospect Chart comes from, and the four waves are his buyer pyramid redrawn with rounder numbers.

Marcus Sheridan (2nd ed., 2019)

The River Pools playbook: out-teach, don't out-sell. Education does the selling long before anyone asks for the price.

Tony Hsieh

Hsieh wrote his culture down and then paid people up to $4,000 to leave if it did not fit. The chapter's opening case, and the first of its written-culture documents.

Kip Tindell

The Container Store's Foundation Principles, and the thesis behind 250-plus hours of first-year training in an industry that averaged eight.

Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (Basecamp)

Named in the chapter's list of written cultures, alongside Hsieh's and Tindell's. Basecamp is also the cautionary half of that story: a culture announced by memo cost the company roughly a third of its people.

Marty Neumeier (2006)

Source of the “onliness statement” the Brand Keel's Wedge is built on: “We are the only ___ that ___.” Borrowed openly, and credited in the chapter.

Simon Sinek

One idea, run everywhere: a twenty-year speaking career on the same Wedge.

Jack Stack & Bo Burlingham

If open-book management resonates, read the book that built the model. Open the real numbers to everyone, teach them to read them, give them a stake in moving them. The full SRC story.

Andrew S. Grove (1983)

The anchor under the reporting cadence: Grove built Intel's discipline around the weekly one-on-one. The cadence is the management.

Peter F. Drucker (1954)

“If you haven't read Drucker, go read Drucker.” Start here, not with the 1973 Management. Both ideas the books borrow originate in the 1954 book: the three questions every business has to answer, and the line that the purpose of a business is to create a customer. Those three questions are what the The Nav Center runs every morning.

Theodore Levitt (Harvard Business Review, 1960)

The railroad question: what business are you in? An article, not a book, but it earns its place on this list.

William Oncken Jr. & Donald L. Wass (Harvard Business Review, 1974)

Monkeys on your back: every decision, every small question, every exception routed through the owner. Dredging renames them squawking seagulls and shows you how to clear the deck.