Skip to content

WoW, I’ve read all of these…. – Amazon’s Small Business & entrpreneur books

  1. Getting Things Done
  2. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
  3. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (I haven’t read this one)
  4. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
  5. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
  6. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Amazon has a Small Business & Entrepreneurship book list… and I’ve read all but one of the top 6 books on the front page.

All excellent books and I agree with them being at the top of the list. But I might put them in this order:

1) 7 habits -
Because this is a life defining book

2) 4 hour workweek -
This book also deals with defining your life and your business goals. It also talks about elimination (a.k.a focus) which is vitally important to the small startup business.

3) E-myth -
This book is more about defining your business (which is why I have it after defining your life – 4 hour workweek). This book talks about the vision of your business. It also delves more into how to eliminate, automate, liberate mentioned in 4 hour work week. The answer is rigid systematisation.

4) Good To Great -
This book takes the planning and vision you have in E-myth and teaches you how to use that to create a stellar (great) company by incremental daily improvement (“pushing on the flywheel” – the Japanese call this Kaizen). It also emphasises that great companies focus on the intersection of their passion, profit engine, and what they can be the best in the world at.

5) Getting Things Done -
It seems to me that this book is the weakest of the six.
Oh, uh. I can hear the GTD fanatics banging on my door. Sorry folks, the book is not that great. Don’t get me wrong, it has great parts. But like most “time-management” books, this book ignores the fact that no matter how efficiently useless busywork is done it is still useless busywork. Stephen Covey’s theories (7 habits) are much more effective (which is more important than efficient) because they first ask “what is important?” and then they do that.
But this book does bring up the importance of having a system that takes the things that are festering on your mind and puts them into a fail proof system. This allows your mind to be clear and your life stress free.
Since this book deals with efficiency only I have put it at the end. Once one has figured out “what is important” (using the first four books) then she can worry about doing it efficiently.