While there are many books on entrepreneurship, there is none on how to avoid failing. Fail-Proof Your Business shows the telltale warning signs of failure and how to deal with them. It also shows how to prevent potentially fatal business problems from occurring in the first place as well as how to save a business that's already in trouble. In addition, this book offers special, often overlooked strategies for business success. Book jacket.
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.
An astute diagnosis of one of the biggest problems in business Denial is the unconscious determination that a certain reality is too terrible to contemplate, so therefore it cannot be true. We see it everywhere, from the alcoholic who swears he's just a social drinker to the president who declares "mission accomplished" when it isn't. In the business world, countless companies get stuck in denial while their challenges escalate into crises. Harvard Business School professor Richard S. Tedlow tackles two essential questions: Why do sane, smart leaders often refuse to accept the facts that threaten their companies and careers? And how do we find the courage to resist denial when facing new trends, changing markets, and tough new competitors? Tedlow looks at numerous examples of organizations crippled by denial, including Ford in the era of the Model T and Coca-Cola with its abortive attempt to change its formula. He also explores other companies, such as Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and DuPont, that avoided catastrophe by dealing with harsh realities head-on. Tedlow identifies the leadership skills that are essential to spotting the early signs of denial and taking the actions required to overcome it.
A must-read for pre-married as well as long-married couples, Craig and Amy Groeschel explore the time-tested wisdom able to guide you and your spouse into the marriage you've always wanted. Everyone dreams of a fairytale marriage--the perfect spouse, the perfect home, the perfect family. But reality tells us that these expectations don't hold up very long. Many studies indicate that close to fifty percent of marriages don't make it. With those odds, is it even possible to have a good marriage--let alone a great one? New York Times bestselling author and pastor Craig Groeschel insists you can . . . but not if you approach it like everyone else does. Perfect for single adults, engaged couples, and married couples alike, Craig and his wife, Amy, show you how to conquer the odds and find the joy, passion, and strength of a marriage built by God. Craig and Amy open their hearts, share personal experiences, and walk you through five powerful commitments you can make to fail-proof your marriage: Seek God Fight fair Have fun Stay pure Never give up If you earnestly choose to do all five of these things, you will discover a richer, deeper, more authentic marriage. Starting right now--from this day forward. Spanish edition also available, as well as a video study and study guide.
This is the Rolls-Royce of the how-to and how-not-to books on entrepreneurship. It covers things that are not even touched-upon by other entrepreneur books. It takes the reader through every stage of funding (without money), partnership compatibility, unique structure, sales, marketing, patents, legal problems, selling out or going public, and much more. It is as fail-proof as anything can be.
"As the founder of Rich20something.com, Daniel DiPiazza has helped thousands break out of their daily grinds, build businesses they care about, and achieve more sucsess than they ever imagined" --Back cover.
Innovation, the conversion of the new to business as usual, is a very special business process. It is the business process able to reprogram all others. Creating the practices that make this process work is a key challenge for all in financial services that are worried about responding to the future. When an institution can identify things that are outside its present practices and convert them, production line style, into products, processes, cultural changes, or new markets, it will never be outpaced by internal or external change again. The institution becomes "FutureProof". This is a book about those practices in banks. It explains, using examples from institutions around the world, what it takes to create an innovation culture that consistently introduces new things into undifferentiated markets and internal cultures. It shows how banks can leverage the power of the new to establish unexpected revenue lines, or make old ones grow. And it provides advice on the social and political factors that either help or hinder the germination of the new in banks. Moreover, though, this is a book about the science of innovation in a banking context. Drawing from practices already highly developed in financial services—managing portfolios of assets to mitigate risk—it explains how practitioners can run their innovations groups like any other business line in the bank one that delivers a return on investment predictably and at high multiples of internal cost of capital. For leaders, Innovation and the Future Proof Bank provides the diagnostic tools to guide benchmarking and investment decisions for the innovation function. And for innovation practitioners, the book lays out everything needed to make sure that converting the new to business as usual is predictable, measurable, and profitable.
“An actionable framework for driving change.”—Adam Grant Will the next rogue wave sink your ship—or will you choose to profit from it? At this moment, rogue waves are forming under your business. Emerging technologies, changing demographics, the data economy, automation, and other trends—the undercurrents of radical, systemic change—are crashing into each other. When they converge, they’ll produce sea changes that sink companies and wash away entire industries overnight. If your competitor can’t ride out the next wave and you can, you win. In Rogue Waves, Jonathan Brill—a renowned expert on resilient growth and decision making under uncertainty—shows you how to prepare your business to survive and thrive through the most radical upheavals. Drawing on years of experience as a Fortune 500 innovation executive, advisor, and entrepreneur, Brill delivers a practical action plan to: Identify and capitalize on the 10 economic, technological, and social trends that will collide to reshape your business Turn sudden threats into outsized opportunities Create a culture of entrepreneurship and experimentation Build and scale leadership skills and processes to supercharge your company’s agility and adaptability This must-read survival guide provides the predictive tools you need to take advantage of randomness, turn chaos into profit, and set your company on the course for long-term success.Resilience is your new strategy for growth.
From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented merger and acquisition activity to scandal, greed, and, ultimately, recession -- we've learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. By outlining the process organizations have used to achieve transformational goals and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.
How the very things we create to protect ourselves, like money market funds or anti-lock brakes, end up being the biggest threats to our safety and wellbeing. We have learned a staggering amount about human nature and disaster -- yet we keep having car crashes, floods, and financial crises. Partly this is because the success we have at making life safer enables us to take bigger risks. As our cities, transport systems, and financial markets become more interconnected and complex, so does the potential for catastrophe. How do we stay safe? Should we? What if our attempts are exposing us even more to the very risks we are avoiding? Would acceptance of danger make us more secure? Is there such a thing as foolproof? In Foolproof, Greg Ip presents a macro theory of human nature and disaster that explains how we can keep ourselves safe in our increasingly dangerous world.
