The Entrepreneur's Paradox


Book Description

“They don’t teach these principles in business school. These lessons can only come from the entrepreneurial book of life.” —Kevin Cope, author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Seeing the Big Picture What is the “entrepreneur’s paradox”? Curtis Morley explains that the exact qualities that aid an individual in founding a startup company—brilliance and expertise—are what prevent them from realizing expected success. What starts as freedom and financial independence turns into grueling hours, stress, bills, and ultimately failure. This is the paradox that is entrepreneurship. Morley is here to show startup businesspersons how to achieve the golden rule of successful entrepreneurs—5x results. That’s achieving five dollars in revenue for every dollar spent on marketing, advertising, sales, and any other growth expenses—a goal he himself has achieved and exceeded. By coaching clients on the sixteen pitfalls faced by all startups, he has promoted entrepreneurship development in multiple industries, sharpened skills, and revealed the keys to superior, next-level growth. This guidebook contains all you need to conquer the entrepreneur’s paradox and put yourself on a defined pathway to business success, while avoiding pitfalls like: · Climbing without a map · Building not selling · Losing sight of culture “Shows prospective business men and women how to reach their goals while creating a launchpad for a business.” —Daily Herald “The playbook for startup success.” —Sean Covey, president of FranklinCovey and coauthor of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller The 4 Disciplines of Execution




Entrepreneurship in Theory and Practice


Book Description

Aimed primarily at undergraduate students, this highly successful textbook provides the reader with a broad overview of the entrepreneurship phenomenon. It focuses on the emergence, evaluation and organizing of entrepreneurial opportunities in various organizational contexts. This thoroughly revised second edition brings it up to date with the newest trends in the entrepreneurship field and includes four insightful new chapters.




The Passion Paradox


Book Description

The coauthors of the bestselling Peak Performance dive into the fascinating science behind passion, showing how it can lead to a rich and meaningful life while also illuminating the ways in which it is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to cultivate a passion that will take you to great heights—while minimizing the risk of an equally great fall. Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness once again team up, this time to demystify passion, showing readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers. They ultimately argue that passion and balance--that other virtue touted by our culture--are incompatible, and that to find your passion, you must lose balance. And that's not always a bad thing. They show readers how to develop the right kind of passion, the kind that lets you achieve great things without ruining your life. Swift, compact, and powerful, this thought-provoking book combines captivating stories of extraordinarily passionate individuals with the latest science on the biological and psychological factors that give rise to—and every bit as important, sustain—passion.




Family Business as Paradox


Book Description

Learn how to overcome the paradox of family business, and understand that synergy of the two entities will bring greater success than choosing one over the other




The Profit Paradox


Book Description

A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power—and how it stifles workers around the world In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil. The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements—acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility. A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.




The Prosperity Paradox


Book Description

Clayton M. Christensen, the author of such business classics as The Innovator’s Dilemma and the New York Times bestseller How Will You Measure Your Life, and co-authors Efosa Ojomo and Karen Dillon reveal why so many investments in economic development fail to generate sustainable prosperity, and offers a groundbreaking solution for true and lasting change. Global poverty is one of the world’s most vexing problems. For decades, we’ve assumed smart, well-intentioned people will eventually be able to change the economic trajectory of poor countries. From education to healthcare, infrastructure to eradicating corruption, too many solutions rely on trial and error. Essentially, the plan is often to identify areas that need help, flood them with resources, and hope to see change over time. But hope is not an effective strategy. Clayton M. Christensen and his co-authors reveal a paradox at the heart of our approach to solving poverty. While noble, our current solutions are not producing consistent results, and in some cases, have exacerbated the problem. At least twenty countries that have received billions of dollars’ worth of aid are poorer now. Applying the rigorous and theory-driven analysis he is known for, Christensen suggests a better way. The right kind of innovation not only builds companies—but also builds countries. The Prosperity Paradox identifies the limits of common economic development models, which tend to be top-down efforts, and offers a new framework for economic growth based on entrepreneurship and market-creating innovation. Christensen, Ojomo, and Dillon use successful examples from America’s own economic development, including Ford, Eastman Kodak, and Singer Sewing Machines, and shows how similar models have worked in other regions such as Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, Rwanda, India, Argentina, and Mexico. The ideas in this book will help companies desperate for real, long-term growth see actual, sustainable progress where they’ve failed before. But The Prosperity Paradox is more than a business book; it is a call to action for anyone who wants a fresh take for making the world a better and more prosperous place.




The Proximity Paradox


Book Description

You’re too close to your business, and it’s killing your creativity Traditional business structures love stability and predictability. Yet many organizations believe the two essential ingredients for long-term success are creativity and innovation. Kiirsten May and Alex Varricchio, founders of the marketing agency UpHouse, call the relationship between these two opposing expectations the Proximity Paradox™ — the belief that those who are closest to a subject are best-qualified to innovate for it, when, in reality, intense proximity limits creativity. Instead, people need to create distance from challenges in order to see the best way forward. May and Varricchio believe that until we can separate innovation and execution within ourselves, we will only innovate to the level at which we can execute the idea. To be effective, we need to create distance between our innovation brain and our execution brain. Unpacking ten common Proximity Paradoxes that affect a company’s people, processes, and industry, the authors share some practical ideas to create the distance necessary for your next great idea. An especially valuable book for creatives, and non-creatives in creative industries, but equally applicable to all businesses that depend on innovation, The Proximity Paradox encourages us to ask hard questions about how we work, how our businesses are structured, and why we routinely find our creativity at odds with what’s asked of us as executors and stewards of the bottom line.




The Innovation Paradox


Book Description

For more than twenty years, major innovations—the kind that transform industries and even societies—seem to have come almost exclusively from startups, despite massive efforts and millions of dollars spent by established companies. Tony Davila and Marc Epstein, authors of the bestselling Making Innovation Work, say the problem is that the very processes and structures responsible for established companies’ enduring success prevent them from developing breakthroughs. This is the innovation paradox. Most established companies succeed through incremental innovation—taking a product they’re known for and adding a feature here, cutting a cost there. Major breakthroughs are hard to achieve when everything about the way your organization is built and run is designed to reward making what already works work a little better. But incremental innovation can coexist with breakthrough thinking. Using examples from both scrappy startups and long-term innovators such as IBM, 3M, Apple, and Google, Davila and Epstein explain how corporate culture, leadership style, strategy, incentives, and management systems can be structured to encourage breakthroughs. Then they bring it all together in a new model called the Startup Corporation, which combines the philosophy of the startup with the experience, resources, and network of an established company. Breakthrough innovation no longer has to be the nearly exclusive province of the new kids on the block. With Davila and Epstein’s assistance, any company can develop paradigm-shifting products and services and maximize the ROI on its R&D.




The Entrepreneurial Paradox


Book Description

Exploring the interaction between entrepreneurs and managers, this book attempts to understand the psychology behind how they think, behave and interact in order to benefit organizations. The Entrepreneurial Paradox shows how to achieve sustainable success and resilience through teamwork. In examining the collective mind, the author asserts that understanding these relationships can secure the right changes within a business through the integration and transfer of entrepreneurial experience and new managerial approaches. Presenting original research, the author reveals new insights into the challenges in such interactions, addresses what causes them and provides a guide for avoiding conflict.




The Innovator's Method


Book Description

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service but didn’t take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company—perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven’t known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator’s method—a set of tools emerging from lean start-up, design thinking, and agile software development that are revolutionizing how new ideas are created, refined, and brought to market. To date these tools have helped entrepreneurs, designers, and software developers manage uncertainty—through cheap and rapid experiments that systematically lower failure rates and risk. But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice. Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator’s DNA—which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas—this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success. Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the “how”—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use. Whether you’re launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.




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