5 Books that Every Entrepreneur Should Read During the Holidays

Blue Ocean Strategy is a best seller by professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. In their work, recognized as one of the most important on business strategy, you will learn how and why to invest in markets that are still untapped. The authors use a metaphor about a red and a blue ocean. The first represents highly competitive markets, in which we have a considerable number of companies struggling fiercely to obtain new clients, and consequently, increase their small profit margins.

On the other hand, the blue ocean represents those markets with low competitiveness, but with great potential for profitability for companies that can offer the right solutions to the right customer. To illustrate the analogy, Kim and Mauborgne bring examples of businesses that have followed this path, such as Starbucks, Bloomberg and Cirque du Soleil.

Maybe the title can give you a wrong impression of what this book is about. If romance is not your cup of tea, consider giving it a go because The Rosie Project goes beyond and teaches how we can maintain our emotional control, an essential skill in leadership positions.

Written by the Australian writer Graeme Simsion, it is on the list of books nominated by Bill Gates.  According to the Microsoft co-founder, the story is deep, funny and generates good reflections on who you are. “This book was so good. I stayed up with it until 3 a.m. —then gifted it to 50 friends” says Gates.

Fun and insightful, David Sedaris has collected funny stories about the difficulty humans have to communicate well. The book Me Talk Pretty One Day was split into two parts. In the first one, he talks about his youth in the United States, and the second, about when he moved to France. The most incredible thing is that the author makes us reflect on how we communicate daily and its role in the connections we made along the way and not even notice them.

Steve Blank, an iconic figure in Silicon Valley, reveals the fundamentals of the methodology, developed by him, of customer development and lean startup – foundations of the culture of startups that have spread worldwide. The book The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company is enlightening for those who want to know the subject in depth. After all, the author is the best person to talk to and teach about it.

This book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success promises to change your life. Authored by Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, she brings the concept of mindset, which can be summed up as the way to face different situations in the context of our lives. This perspective is considered to define our success or failure in the personal and professional fields.

Throughout the book, the author presents several academic research results regarding personal development, concluding that there are two types of mindset: one fixed and the other progressive. The first is linked to restrictive thoughts, which question our ability to achieve. The second, in turn, is associated with the capacity for unrestricted growth in different areas.

According to her, we manifest one and another mindset, depending on the situation, but we can condition ourselves to the progressive attitude using a method presented throughout the book.