Why Startups Fail


Book Description

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.




Partnering with the Frenemy


Book Description

Selected as a finalist for the 2018 Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award! Why do crucial business partnerships and alliances fail so often and how can you keep it from happening to you? Partnering with the Frenemy answers these questions, helping you anticipate, prevent, and solve the problems that lead close business relationships to implode. Drawing on cutting-edge research, Sandy Jap illuminates the widespread “frenemy” phenomenon in organizational partnerships, where partners who start as non-competitive “friends” become “enemies” over time. She identifies key economical and structural causes of “frenemization,” in which success creates imbalances in power dynamics, leading partners to generate resentment, contempt, and often direct competition. She also illuminates crucial social causes for partnership failure, where seemingly innocuous acts of interpersonal opportunism and “sins of omission” gradually poison collaboration. To support her insights, she offers numerous case studies, both ongoing and historical, including Samsung/Google, Martha Stewart/Macy’s, Oracle/Sun Microsystems, Best Buy/Apple, Calvin Klein/Warnaco, and Nike/Footlocker. Most important, she offers specific recommendations for avoiding problems, revitalizing weakening partnerships, and recognizing when a partnership can’t be saved. IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT CONTRACTS AND MONEY Understand how to better manage emotions, suspicions, and expectations from Day 1 WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM OTHERS’ FAILING PARTNERSHIPS Anticipate, prevent, and mitigate the core causes of business relationship failure RECOGNIZE PARTNERING “OPPORTUNISM” BEFORE IT DESTROYS COLLABORATION Fix partnering problems while you still can IT’S NOT A MARRIAGE: HOW TO BECOME COMFORTABLE SAYING GOODBYE Know when to end a partnership, and how to part as “friends”




Remix Strategy


Book Description

Create and capture value, no matter what path you've chosen. How to Create Joint Value Alliances, partnerships, acquisitions, mergers, and joint ventures are no longer the exception in most businesses—they are part of the core strategy. As managers look to external partners for resources and capabilities, they need a practical roadmap to ensure that these relationships will create value for their firm. They must answer questions like these: Which business combinations do we need? How should we govern them? Will their results justify our investments? Benjamin Gomes-Casseres explains how companies create value by “remixing” resources with other companies. Based on decades of consulting and academic research, Remix Strategy shows how three laws shape the success of any business combination: • First Law: The combination must have the potential to create more value than the parties could create on their own. Which elements from each business need to be combined to create joint value? • Second Law: The combination must be designed and managed to realize the joint value. Which partners best fit our strategic goals? How should we manage the integration? • Third Law: The value earned by the parties must motivate them to contribute to the collaboration. How will we share the joint value created? Will the returns shift over time? Supported by examples from a wide range of industries and companies, and filled with practical tools for applying the three laws, this book helps managers design and lead a coherent strategy for creating joint value with outside partners.




The Structure of Success


Book Description

A simple framework for success Creating success, and avoiding failure, for small and medium-sized businesses has proven—over a sustained period—to be the direct result of the decisions and actions made by their leaders about the internal structures of these businesses. By focusing on building a strong core, business founders, owners, and executives have the power to ensure success, rather than falling prey to failure. The Structure of Success provides a simple framework—consisting of approaches, methodologies, and tools for assessing, determining, planning, and implementing decisions—for building the internal structural components of a business, and, specifically, focusing on the eight most important categories that have been shown to impact success and failure for small and medium-sized businesses: • Governance models and governance team composition • Management team models, composition, engagement, and compensation • Adjustments and pivots • Growth and infrastructure development • Business disputes and breakups • Acquisitions, mergers, exits, and other business transactions • Disaster preparedness and management • Succession planning When leaders of small and medium-sized businesses address these categories and revisit these topics regularly, they will produce the core structural components that will help them to meet their business goals, manage the risks and threats that arise, and position themselves—and their businesses—for success.




Your Comprehensive Guide to Franchise Success


Book Description

Your Comprehensive Guide to Franchise Success was created to solve the problem of misaligned interests in franchise sales, as well as a lack of tools to promote good decision making in franchise purchasing. Jimmy St. Louis’ goal is to help fledgling business owners and entrepreneurs determine the right franchise and prepare them for success as a franchise owner and operator. His approach requires three definitive steps: Identify: Is franchising right for you? Assess your business skills, identify your preferences, and determine your non-negotiables as you compare different industries and identify which ones appeal to you. Research: What brands and franchise models align with your skill set? Use our workbook to compare brands, evaluate franchise models, review FDDs, and engage directly with franchisors and franchisees. Decide: Are you ready to take the plunge? Sign your franchise agreement and start forming concrete plans with your franchisor’s guidance and support. For anyone looking to gain financial independence, dreaming of owning a business, or looking to expand their business portfolio, investing in a franchise is an incredible experience—but it’s also a big decision to make. Your Comprehensive Guide to Franchise Success is designed with simple, easy-to-follow steps for those looking to enter the exciting world of franchise ownership.




Marketing Management


Book Description




School, Family, and Community Partnerships


Book Description

Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.




The Narrow Road


Book Description

One of the world's most successful media moguls shares eighty-eight tips for starting a business and getting rich. In How to Get Rich, British mogul Felix Dennis told the engaging story of how he started a media empire and became one of the wealthiest men in Britain-all without a college degree or any formal training. Now he shows readers exactly what it takes to start a business and make it successful. Dennis offers a pithy guide for those determined to attempt what he calls the getting of money-regardless of the consequences. His eighty-eight tips include: ? Do not fall in love with any project. You may believe in it wholeheartedly, but must remain prepared to abandon it should it show signs of failing. ? If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly and even catastrophically, you will never be rich. ? You will never get rich working for your boss. No one knows better than Dennis what it takes to get rich, and his battle-tested advice-delivered with his signature wit-will surely appeal to serious entrepreneurs.




Enduring Success


Book Description

Enduring Success addresses a key question in business today: How can companies succeed over time? To learn the source of enduring greatness, author Christian Stadler directed a team of eight researchers in a six-year study of some of Europe's oldest and most stellar companies, targeting nine that have survived for more than 100 years and have significantly outperformed the market over the past fifty years. Readers may wonder, "Why European companies?" Yet, Europe is the ideal place to seek the key to long-term success; half of the Fortune Global 500 companies that are 100 years old or older can be found in Europe, as can 72 of the 100 oldest family businesses in the world. Fifteen years after Collins and Porras' Built to Last, this new book incorporates fresh insights from management science and provides the first non-US perspective on long-range success. Through Stadler's study, a counterintuitive story emerges: the greatest companies adapt to a constantly changing environment by being intelligently conservative. Enduring Success provides a coherent framework, grounded in five principles and practical concepts, for business leaders who are prepared to learn from the history of some of the world's greatest institutions. Please visit the author's YouTube channel www.youtube.com/user/StadlerChristian for more discussion of the book.




Who's in Your Room?


Book Description

Imagine your life as a simple room with four walls. Who are you letting in and who are you kicking out? Can you imagine living a better life? Would you like to surround yourself with more supportive people? There’s hope! You see, the quality of your life depends on the people in your life. THE SIMPLE AND POWERFUL IDEAS IN THIS BOOK CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE FOREVER. Who’s in Your Room? introduces you to the concept of your life being like a room—a room where anyone who enters affects your life . . . forever. Although this concept may sound frightening, this book gives you the tools and exercises you need to take control of your room and live the life you desire. This book brings in experts to describe how people leave you with memories that cannot be erased but can be managed. You manage them by determining what’s really important to you, and then you can determine how to spend your time and whom you should be spending it with. Stop living according to everyone else’s rules. Shape your life by taking control of your room. Live your life by your design!