Business Books

Business Model Generation
by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur and 470 contributors!

Game Changing & Practical

Lots of books talk about business models including some of the books below. But this is the first one that I know of that provides a real framework for discussing and manipulating business models. It's a real eye opener. Of course many of the examples in the book are already well known and documented in other books. But here the authors use the business model canvas (the above mentioned framework) to breakdown each business model into it's core components, which make it easier to talk about and analyze them. The Business Model Canvas is just the begining. The rest of the book discusses busiess model patterns, design using visual thinking and prototyping and lots more.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne

Rare Common Sense

This is the first book I’ve read about branding and differentiation. The author is full of common sense but the weird thing as that this type of common sense is not so common in business. Obviously this is not a step by step guide to building a great business. There is no such thing. What you do get is a nice framework to position your idea and see how you compare within your extended competitive landscape. Applying this framework to your own idea might require more intuition than you think (otherwise creating the next best thing would be too simple) but the author uses many case studies as examples of how to use the framework. Of course, he has the benefit of hindsight but that’s no reason to dismiss the ideas. Great book and fun to read.

BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep it Simple and Succeed
by Allen P. Adamson

Less Is More

This book focuses on one concept: brand stickiness. And like most things, though what you are doing might be rocket science, to get the brand to stick you need to be able to explain it clearly in a few memorable words. Brand Simple is about reducing what you are doing to it’s essence. If you can’t do that then according to the author you are not sufficiently focused as a brand and you won’t be able to get the stickiness you want. The author uses many examples of well known brand names to get his point across. I’m no marketer but this book struck a chord with me nonetheless as I tend to think that, as with many things in life, “Less is More”.

Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands
by Marty Neumeier

Essentials of Differentiation

One way to summarize this book is to say that it’s the “Essence of Blue Ocean Strategy with a dash of Brand Simple”. Whereas “Blue Ocean Strategy” explores multiple business cases in various industries, Zag concentrates on one example: their wine bar. The differentiation ideas are similar in both books though more detailed in “Blue Ocean Strategy”. Now I’m no a branding expert but the book did give me the feeling that I was participating in the branding of this wine bar. I had the feeling of understanding what good branding was about though I’m sure that in reality it’s always a bit more complicated. The books ideas are presented in a clear and concise way, which means that the author knows what he’s talking about. It’s also a quick and easy read as the format is small and the type big.

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Already a Business Blogging "Classic"

If blogging would have it’s classics then “Naked Conversations” would certainly amongst them. The main themes of the is also about putting a human face on business and gaining higher credibility along the way. Though it’s about business blogging, it can also apply to personal blogging. You will also read about the rules of engagement on the blogsphere and the implications they might have for your business. It basically boils down to to being authentic, passionate, opinionated and removing roadblocks to the free flowing conversation. Business implications cover privacy issues, information security, self censoring, fear and much more. All in all, it’s a great way to jump-start your blogging knowledge.