"Essential reading for the business leaders of tomorrow and a fascinating study of the boardroom as the new battlefield" - Booklist THE CLASSIC MILITARY TEXT, NOW ANALYSED FOR THE BUSINESS-MINDED. The Art of War by Sun Tzu has been a much-studied work of military strategy for hundreds of years, influencing great leaders in all walks of life. Here, business journalist Mark Smith applies the lessons to the role of the entrepreneur by showing how the axioms of General Sun Tzu apply to creating and expanding a business in a successful and meaningful way. Illustrated with numerous case studies of business owners whose strategies show how these ideas can work and containing quotes and tips from well-known business leaders and innovators, The Entrepreneur's Guide to The Art of War will show you how to: • lay firm foundations for your intended business • choose your staff and co-workers effectively • study your competitors in order to be stronger and better at what you do • maintain a good working environment and happy employees • work out your business's path to continued success With helpful diagrams and illustrations, business leaders in the making will find this an invaluable companion.
Defeat the competition and dominate the market with these masterful strategies of Sun Tzu. Over two and a half millennia ago, Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu taught that size alone does not guarantee victory--strategy, positioning, planning, and leadership all play equally significant roles in overpowering the opposition. Today, this classic treatise is perfect for adapting to the world of small business, with entrepreneurs entrenched in fierce competition for customers, market share, and talent. Featuring inspiring examples of entrepreneurial success, The Art of War for Small Business centers its 12 timeless lessons on how to: Choose the right ground for your battles Leverage strengths while overcoming limitations Strike competitors’ weakest points and seize every opportunity Focus priorities and resources on conquering key challenges Go where the enemy is not Build and leverage strategic alliances Countless military, political, and business leaders across the world and throughout time have learned how to utilize these brilliant strategies to outsmart, outmaneuver, and outstrategize their larger adversaries’ seemingly overwhelming forces. Now, it’s time for the small business owner to learn how they can also capture crucial sectors, serve unmet needs, and emerge victorious.
More than two millennia ago the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote the classic work on military strategy, The Art of War. Now, in a new edition of Sun Tzu and the Art of Business, Mark McNeilly shows how Sun Tzu's strategic principles can be applied to twenty-first century business. Here are two books in one: McNeilly's synthesis of Sun Tzu's ideas into six strategic principles for the business executive, plus the text of Samuel B. Griffith's popular translation of The Art of War. McNeilly explains how to gain market share without inciting competitive retaliation, how to attack competitors' weak points, and how to maximize market information for competitive advantage. He demonstrates the value of speed and preparation in throwing the competition off-balance, employing strategy to beat the competition, and the need for character in leaders. Lastly, McNeilly presents a practical method to put Sun Tzu's principles into practice. By using modern examples throughout the book from Google, Zappos, Amazon, Dyson, Aflac, Singapore Airlines, Best Buy, the NFL, Tata Motors, Starbucks, and many others, he illustrates how, by following the wisdom of history's most respected strategist, executives can avoid the pitfalls of management fads and achieve lasting competitive advantage.
"A ROLLICKING READ ABOUT THE CORPORATE WORLD'S GREATEST RIVALRIES." ADAM GRANT, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Originals, and host of the TED podcast WorkLife Based on the chart-topping BUSINESS WARS podcast, here are the stories and lessons from history's greatest business rivalries - retold as you've never heard them before. Some of the companies here have been featured on the podcast, many are entirely new, and ALL of the material presents a fresh perspective, with each chapter thematically inspired by a chapter of Sun Tzu's classic, The Art of War. From the pocket showdown of iPhone vs Blackberry to the epic stand-off of Beats vs Monster, The Art of Business Wars goes deep into the business trenches to explore the stories behind the stories. In this gripping study of triumph and disaster, you'll discover the real-life love spat between the co-founders of Tinder which led to the creation of its competitor Bumble, the battle of the fast fashion giants H&M and Zara where speed is everything, how Wrigley almost bit off more than it could chew, and Nintendo leveled up in America. With these and many more tales from business battlefields all over the world The Art of Business Wars reveals the strategies, positioning, dirty tricks, and eye for exploiting vulnerabilities, that make the difference between success and failure. David Brown, host of the hit podcast Business Wars, masterfully frames some of the biggest business rivalries in history using the wisdom and pragmatic advice of revered Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. Each battle Brown examines tells a story of contending wits, strategies, and resources. He chronicles the rise of companies as they formulate innovative plans, vanquish foes, and adapt to shifting societal needs. The goal: stay ahead of the competition and emerge victorious as an industry titan. Compiling powerful insights uncovered over hundreds of episodes and more than a year of in-depth research, Brown offers an extraordinary formula for victory woven into a series of gripping, real-life tales straight from the business trenches. The stories in The Art of Business Wars are fascinating, but the lessons we draw from them - about determination, ingenuity, patience, grit, subtlety, and other key traits that contribute to a victorious enterprise - are invaluable, whether you're a software-slinging freelancer or the CEO of a multinational corporation.
An account of the decade-long conflict between humankind and hordes of the predatory undead is told from the perspective of dozens of survivors who describe in their own words the epic human battle for survival, in a novel that is the basis for the June 2013 film starring Brad Pitt. Reissue. Movie Tie-In.
By exploring the basic components of The Art of War, this guide to personal development and success shows you how to unleash your full potential, triumph over adversity, and achieve long-term goals.
Freedom. It's the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want. It's the ultimate reward of selling your business. But selling a company can be confusing, and one wrong step can easily cost you dearly. The Art of Selling Your Business: Winning Strategies & Secret Hacks for Exiting on Top is the last in a trilogy of books by author John Warrillow on building value. The first, Built to Sell, encouraged small business owners to begin thinking about their business as more than just a job. The Automatic Customer tagged recurring revenue as the core element in a valuable company and provided a blueprint for transforming almost any business into one with an ongoing annuity stream. Warrillow completes the set with The Art of Selling Your Business. This essential guide to monetizing a business is based on interviews the author conducted on his podcast, Built to Sell Radio, with hundreds of successfully cashed-out founders. What's the secret for harvesting the value you've created when it's time to sell? The Art of Selling Your Business answers important questions facing any founder, including— • What's your business worth? • When's the best time to sell? • How do you create a bidding war? • How can you position your company to maximize its attractiveness? • Who will pay the most for your business? • What’s the secret for punching above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company? The Art of Selling Your Business provides a sleeves-rolled-up action plan for selling your business at a premium by an author with consummate credibility.
A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs shows how the insights of leading venture capitalists can teach readers to create a unique approach to building a successful business. Through profiles and interviews of figures such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz, and Jenny Lee of GGV Capital, Tren Griffin draws out the fundamental lessons from their ideas and experiences. Entrepreneurs should learn from past successes but also be prepared to break new ground. While there are best practices, there is no single recipe they should follow. By better understanding the views and experiences of a wide range of successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, readers can discern which of many possible paths will lead to success. With insight and verve, Griffin argues that innovation and best practices are discovered by the experimentation of entrepreneurs as they establish the evolutionary fitness of their business. The products and services created through this experimentation that have greater fitness survive, and less-fit products and services die. Entrepreneurs have always experimented when creating or altering a business. What is different today is the existence of modern tools and systems that allow experiments to be conducted more cheaply and rapidly than ever before. Griffin shows that listening to what the best venture capitalists have to say is invaluable for entrepreneurs. Their experiences, if studied carefully, teach bedrock methods and guiding principles for approaching business.
I hope that this book will inspire you to act. To make that move. To fulfill your vision. I want to take you closer to your goal, whether that be starting a billion-dollar unicorn, building a revolution, or just helping you better understand that change of any kind starts with you. You can be the Startup Hero.Startup Heroes are the ones that drive progress, and whether you bring us to another planet or make your neighborhood a nicer, happier place, you can become a Startup Hero. This book is the first step. It helps you take that first step.The step will be different for everyone. It might be to call that customer. It might be to draw up a design concept. It might be to talk to your boss.With this book, I hope to guide people to think big, drive change and go full speed ahead. I am giving them a pledge to do their work for good, and I am giving them some of the tools they need to accomplish their goals.This book is hard. It takes you through a variety of activities, questions, stories and challenges (even puzzles and poems) working both the right and left side of your brain and all the parts in between. The activities I propose are challenging and sometimes even embarrassing. The questions I ask are probing and provoking. The stories I tell are used as examples to guide you toward what I call Startup Heroism.So, why would you read this book? Well, I have worked for 30 years for entrepreneurs. I have supported, funded and coached Startup Heroes all my working life. And I have tested the concepts of this book on the students at Draper University and they have come out to be some of the most interesting, dynamic, and motivated people the world has ever seen. In fact, we have had about 1000 students from over 60 different countries come through the program at this writing, and they have started more than 300 companies!I wrote this book so that some of the thinking that I applied to Draper University could be spread wider, in hopes that these messages would reach other potential Startup Heroes (maybe you) who might make an impact on the world, be proactive about their work, or at the very least, improve their lives.So, I implore you. Read this book, try this book, do this book, play this book, absorb this book, experience this book. It might surprise you. It might thrill you. It might drive you. It might kill you. At the very least, I hope it will give you a perspective on how real progress is made, and at the very best, it might just change your life.
Startups are increasingly becoming the engine of innovation across all industries. We are living in an age where an entire generation of young entrepreneurs with different backgrounds and skill sets are coming together and collaborating with a desire to disrupt existing markets, challenge the status quo, replace the old with the new and, above all else, make the world a better place. Startups, however, are constantly facing the challenge of how to make an impact given their initial small size and limited resources. Nine out of ten startups fail, and more than fifty percent do not reach past the five-year mark. The few that do manage to survive can quickly find themselves swamped in the oversaturated market, unable to make any decent progress. So how can they establish themselves among their immediate competitors, let alone defeat larger, more established companies? Is the story of David and Goliath still relevant in the modern business world? Hence the need to write an engaging book that offers unique, viable solutions to all the problems small startups face especially in their early stages. This book provide practical teachings on how startups can strengthen their foundations, reach the pinnacle of the business world and, ultimately, become a virtuous leader of startups in the model of Machiavelli's "The Prince." What does a 500-year-old figure from history have to do with the world of startups? I first encountered Machiavelli in high school in Italy. At the time, he did not represent much more to me than just another part of my studies, but he came rushing back when I moved to the US to finish high school in a small town of Ohio. I used to talk to people who knew little about Italy, but who could still quote Machiavelli's most famous lines: "The end justifies the means" and "It is better to be feared than loved." Machiavelli seemed to be even more popular in America than in Italy. This triggered my curiosity and pushed me to do more research on him. I realized that throughout history, politicians, generals, philosophers and other leaders have all harnessed his philosophies in their own fields. He has also been criticized as being overly cynical, cruel or cutthroat. However, I think this is too dismissive and partial. Machiavelli was, more than anything, a pragmatic realist. He devoted himself to finding patterns in human nature and history, and was perfectly aware of what was ethical and unethical, encouraging aspiring leaders to reach their goals through "virtue"; to rely on hard work rather than luck; and to try to be loved rather than feared (while noting it is easier to be feared). He also understood that necessity and emergency compels leaders to make tough decisions. During my studies at Harvard Business School, I began to apply Machiavelli's principles to the business world, finding his teachings tremendously modern and useful for my own startup. I realized that as, a serial entrepreneur, I was already applying many of his tactics without even being aware of it. So I started decoding and adapting his writings to the world of startups, testing his teachings in the field. From this experience, and from Machiavelli's two most influential books "The Art of War" and "The Prince," came the idea for "The Art of Startups."
