Startups

Book

Measure What Matters

Written by the BookSphere team to start this shelf off. What would change this week if you treated this book as a practice instead of a take-away?

Book

Rework

Written by the BookSphere team to start this shelf off. What would change this week if you treated this book as a practice instead of a take-away?

Book

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Horowitz says directly that there is no recipe for the hard things, and then spends the book on situations where every option is bad. Layoffs, demoting a loyal friend, telling the truth to people who will leave because of it. That structure is the argument. Most business books present decisions with a right answer that was obvious in retrospect. This one presents decisions where the person deciding did not know, and where the outcome does not settle whether the call was correct. The weakness is the same as the strength. Advice drawn from one operator's crises does not obviously generalise, and the book does not claim it does. What decision are you carrying where you still cannot tell whether you got it right?

Book

Zero to One

The famous interview question is what important truth do very few people agree with you on. It sounds like an invitation to be provocative. It is closer to a test of whether you have any first-hand knowledge at all. Most answers fail in one of two directions: they are merely unpopular opinions with no evidence, or they are consensus views stated aggressively. A real answer requires you to have seen something others have not had access to. The deeper argument in the book is that competition destroys profit, and that most people compete because it is legible rather than because it is wise. That claim is much more contestable than the monopoly framing suggests, and the book is thin on cases where monopoly harmed the customer. What would you actually answer? And how would you know it was knowledge rather than taste?

Book

The Innovator's Dilemma

Christensen's argument was narrow and testable: incumbents lose because they rationally serve their best customers, while a cheaper, worse product improves from below until it is good enough. The word has since been stretched to cover any successful new entrant. Uber is the standard counterexample; by the original definition it was not disruptive, it was a better product entering at the top. Christensen said so himself. The theory has also faced empirical challenge, notably Jill Lepore's argument that the case selection favoured the conclusion and that several disrupted incumbents did fine. Does the narrow version still predict anything? Where have you seen a genuine low-end entry that incumbents rationally ignored?

Rumelt's kernel is diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action. The test he offers is simple and brutal: if your strategy does not identify a specific obstacle, it is not a strategy. By that standard most corporate strategy is bad strategy in his precise sense. Ambitious targets, values statements and a list of initiatives that do not reinforce each other. The tell is that you could swap the company name and the document would still read fine. The uncomfortable implication is that real strategy requires saying what you will not do, which is politically expensive in a way that goal-setting is not. What is the best diagnosis you have seen written down? Not the plan, the diagnosis.

Book

The Lean Startup

Ries defined the minimum viable product as the smallest experiment that produces validated learning. In practice the term got used to justify shipping a thin product and calling the resulting silence data. The distinction the book makes and most teams drop is that an MVP is an experiment with a hypothesis attached. Without a stated hypothesis and a threshold that would falsify it, you have not run an experiment. You have launched something small. There is a second problem. Iterative validation works when customers can evaluate what you show them. It works badly when the value only appears at scale, or in categories where users cannot articulate the need until the thing exists. Where have you seen the method fail honestly? Not because it was applied badly, but because the product was the wrong shape for it?

Book

The Innovator's Dilemma

Written by the BookSphere team to start this shelf off. What would change this week if you treated this book as a practice instead of a take-away?