* https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0...

* https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Life-Work-Ray-Dalio/dp/150...

He's one of my favorite business thinkers.

Enjoy his 10 suggestions for young people.

http://amzn.to/1SVR48M

From the book Good to Great. Excellent read!

He got Wells Fargo and Walgreens right tho'.

You should read great books because you want a different perspective and will hopefully be entertained; don't read a book because you think it will make you a better entrepreneur.

Consider The Lobster - David Foster Wallace

I'll pass, thanks.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/69726/

Good to Great by Jim Collins
One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard
First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters

If you have a science background then read
1) Good to Great
2) Life 3.0

If you don't have a science background
1) Future of Capitalism.
2) Good to Great

"Good to great" is a fantastic book for every entrepreneur out there.

Go! read them right now.

"Long Walk to Freedom" - Currently reading.

"Good to Great" - Up next.

Are you serious? Sounds like that post is a lot of BS to get attention. Better go read a good book based on actual _research_ like "Good to Great" or "Built to Last", both by Jim Collins.

- Jawad Shuaib

https://mashable.com/2017/03/22/7-habits-you-need-instead-of...

Some of the history of “passion primacy” is based on the Hedgehog Concept of Jim Collins in his book Good to Great:

https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-hedgehog-concept.htm...

Mr. Collins was talking about great companies, however. But his three criteria are instructive.

Put another way: passion finds you. And it probably won’t if you’re thinking too much about it.

I found a summarized version of this chapter on his website...

http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/best-beats...

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Moore and Gillette

The lean startup

Paul Graham how to start a startup

Mark Hyman Ultimate Mind Solution

Tribal Leadership

Wheel of Time

Think and Grow Rich

Superior Man David Deida

The Fountain Head

Eckhart Tolle New Earth

50th Law

Good to Great

Jed Mckenna

Earl Nightengale

Long Walk to Freedom

Outliers

Good to Great

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz (Self-image)

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey(Being awesome)

Wealth of Nations

Wayne Dyer The Tao

System of the World

Origin of Species

Brave new world

Thank you economy

Crush it

Built to Last

Who Moved my Cheese

Stillness Speak Eckhert Tolle

Mastery George Leonard

Steve Jobs Biography

The Last Lecture

Steve Pavlina Books

Iacocca

Striking Thoughts Bruce Lee

Carlos Castaneda

Ghost in the Wires

Richest Man in Babylon

Way of the Superior Man

Losing My Virginity

Think and Grow Rich

Delivering Happiness

You can also subscribe to the fs blog or their podcast The Knowledge Project. They do a lot with mental models.

The book The Art of Thinking Clearly is another great book that covers biases of the mind in one to two pages each.

The Tim Ferris podcast surprisingly has some amazing guests filled with life advice. I just listened to one with Jim Collins, author of Good to Great. It was absolutely fantastic.

Having read books like "Good to Great" and "Creative Capital" and given my own personal experience at a large company, I raise Elon Musk to the "Super-Man" level because of his leadership. Consider the technical challenges and setbacks that his companies (Tesla and SpaceX) have faced. It is no easy task to maintain the vision and energy necessary to motivate the thousands of people who work for him in the face of such issues and audacious goals.

I don't really consider him Super-Man by the way and I have never met him. I only know how difficult realizing my own visions in life have been. To be in his position certainly requires more of "something" that I am yet to discover in myself. I therefore consider him worthy of my respect.

But there are businesses out there that care about more than the bottom line.

'Good To Great' and 'Start With Why' are good books that document such businesses.

Good to Great, by Jim Collins (and all his other books)

How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh

Peak, by Chip Conley

As far as books I find entertaining and stimulating, but not necessarily actionable, anything by Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell.

As a programmer :

1. The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup.

2. Operating System Concepts by Silberschatz

3. Compilers by Aho

As an agile software developer:

1. eXtreme Programming by Kent Beck

2. Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt and Thomas

3. Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble

As an architect:

1. Domain Driven Design by Evans

2. Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture by Buschmann

3. Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte

As a CEO:

1. Good To Great by Collins

2. Lean Startup by Eric Ries

3. Beyond Budgeting by Pfläging

There are exceptions, Ray Dalio being a recent good example. But I think he is more the exception, not the rule.

Below is a related passage from Essentialism that touches upon this dynamic:

"Jim Collins, the author of the business classic Good to Great, was once told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or build great ideas but not both. Jim chose ideas. As a result of this trade-off there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing."

McKeown, Greg. Essentialism (p. 55)

See also: any “how to succeed in business” book like Good To Great.

The reason I ask is I tend to be pretty cautious about these types of predictors of "business success" given that VCs nor research teams ("Good to Great" by Jim Collins) don't exactly have a strong track record.

An interesting test would be to make it time bound and run it on something like Clinkle circa late 2013.

Taleb's whole point was that this is an illusion caused by selection bias. Hard times don't create strong men. Hard times kill everyone who is weak. Hard times make everybody weaker, but they cause those who are weak to begin with to drop out of sample pool, leaving only those who were strong to begin with.

The classic example is Jim Collins' bestselling business book, Good to Great. The book claimed that certain characteristics of successful companies made them Great.

Inconveniently for Collins, after the book came out, these very same companies underperformed and went from Great to Good.

Of course, he did the statistics backwards. He started with the successful companies and looked for common traits. He should've started with the traits and evaluated how companies with-and-without those traits performed.

    Kelly’s overarching philosophy owes to business texts, most directly, 
    the writings of Jim Collins (“Good to Great” and “Built to Last,” among others), 
    who argues that successful organizations coalesce around a concise, easily 
    communicated core mission. Kelly said: “If someone says to me, 
    ‘What do you stand for?’ I should be able to invite them to practice and in 
    five minutes, they’d say: ‘I see it. I get it.’ 
    They stand for playing hard and playing fast.”

Message me after. I am at wmarchibald@gmail.com

EDIT: Oh! Also "Eat People" by same author - Kessler : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0049U4KC6/

Semi-edited: Everybody else will say Zero to whatever, and the Hard things about Hard Things, and Jimmie's book Good to Great and Crossing the Chasm, and you might call me mad (and I may be!), I am the only person who will recommend a book called "Eat People". (It is a good book, though)

EDIT2: U - akjha - Please let me know what you thought. You have my email address.

There are also some really great mini books like Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007P5N8D4/ref=oh_aui_d_d...)

Also, I haven't tried these yet, but there are a number of subscription services available for summaries like http://www.summary.com/ and http://www.getabstract.com/en/

The other way of cheating is by watching talks by the authors, which give you the key concepts from the book in an hour. For example Simon Sinek presenting Why Leaders Eat Last (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReRcHdeUG9Y)

It's survivor bias bullshit wrapped up in feel-good propaganda and people eat it up every time. Study successful people and emulate them. Of course! How could we go wrong?

Nevermind that the successful people are more likely to just be lucky or even just plain wrong about the reasons for their success.

I attribute my success to hard work, getting up early, making steady progress every day, picking great people to work with, and staying ahead of the curve. Sounds great, right? But to really know if any of that matters, we have to study a large number of people who also profess to do exactly those things and see if they're way more successful than average. If they're not...well then I'm just wrong about the reasons for my own success and other factors are more important.

It doesn't sell books though when your message is "in order to be successful you have to be naturally smart, tall, and attractive, work about as hard as everyone else, and be well-connected and lucky."

Harvard Business Review on Managing Yourself was a good book. Managing yourself is the first step to managing others. I also enjoyed Persuasion: The Art of Influencing People, A Sense of Urgency, and Good to Great.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the 'huge' bonuses usually aren't very large from an income statement point of view; if you bought an extra 0.5% growth (or savings), it was easily worth it.

As to why this is allowed, I think it's seen as a private transaction between well-informed and consenting parties, so there needs to be a compelling reason for legislation and regulation.

-Organized an event for +200 people with +10 sponsors for a non-profit.

-Read amazing books, most notably: Zero to One, The Innovator's Dilemma, Good to Great and A Brief History of Time; among others.

-Considerably improoved my competitive programming skills

-Made various sites, I'm rocking on front-end dev

-Went to India to teach various subjects to unprivileged kids

-Went to Dubai to share time with my dad after having him away for 19 years

-Traveled to the US 2 times (Florida and North Virginia)

-Have written essays which really smart people are debating around the internet

-Despite the heavy workload, I'm keeping up with college

I am entering my fifth military deployment so I can speak to the nature of spontaneously formed teams of strangers. Intelligence is largely, but not completely, irrelevant. You learn to identify that a team is strongest due to a mix of good discipline and putting the proper personalities in the correct positions and then codifying a single common purpose. I recommend reading the book Good To Great for further examination.

So mostly CSRs / sales, right? Outbound cold calling and the like.

"Haven't you read any business books? Good to Great? Winning? The One Minute Manager?"

Why would they? Those are books aimed at business management, not customer service representatives.

I'm working as a paramedic. I don't prep for my new paramedic job by reading the textbooks my Medical Director (an MD) does.

It comes down to efficiency. We should all focus on being as effective as possible in the shortest amount of time. Prioritization is another way to look at it - spend time on the most important things.

This reminds me of Colman Mockler - longtime CEO of Gillette. He thwarted corporate takeovers throughout the 80's and led Gillette to massive growth and share price increases, up until his death in '91. He did all this while adamantly not working past 5pm. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find much information him online but the book, Good to Great, covers him in detail.

Sheryl Sandberg is another great example of someone who draws the line at 5:30pm and seems to be hugely effective. http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/12/facebooks-sheryl-sandb...

Oh, and something tells me little oversight for your writers leads to massive internal communication issues like these...

The things you handwave away - putting a business need in place, letting C levels percolate the concepts until a strategy emerged, they are all evidence of effective leadership.

It's wickedly difficult to set the initial conditions for emergent organizational success. Simply discounting Bezos by saying that he threw piles of money at the problem with the right people in the room is misunderstanding what his job is. His job is to get the right people in the room - identifying the right people is very hard. The more difficult job is listening to what they say. Casting aside your own ego and confronting difficult data. Most leaders have too little courage and too much ego to be able to do this effectively.

If you'd like insight into how important having the right leader can be then I'd recommend starting by reading the book Good to Great by Jim Collins or at least the chapters on leadership.

In the book Good to Great, there's discussion on finding a good "denominator". They give Walgreens as an example of maximizing "profit per customer". Any denominator choice tends to have different effects on your business style and this is another way to optimize. In a lot of workforce-intensive industries, I assume it really just mirrors your overall profit as labor costs could be your number one expense.

Good to Great features abstract bullshit with virtually no concrete practices. If you're not a details person, by all means read good to great and use a divining rod to try to steer your company to success.

By the way, if you haven't read Good to Great, I highly recommend it. Although based on large, slow-moving businesses, the general points Collins and his team extract are easily applicable to just about any significant project.

Go read Good To Great and prepare to barf. Business schools adore this book. Look at the description on Jim Collins's web site [1]: "Start with 1,435 good companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that became great. Now here's how you can do it too." That's literally Survivorship Bias.

1: http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-gr...

As to the generational differences, I had not noticed only the older devs wanting to "cowboy" while the younger devs "cooperate". Usually, it has been a variety of both doing both. I will have to keep my eye on that though.

Relating it back to Jim Collins's books (like "Good to Great"), the difficult geniuses create phenomenal successes that peter out once they leave, but the easy going geniuses build organizations that are great on their own and can generate success without all the yelling.

Inspiration is more powerful than browbeating, but it's also a whole lot harder.

I guess this model presumes that the right people will be supplied by the investor to fill predetermined seats. Does the CEO have a say in that? Is it possible to fill seats without the CEO in the decision making process? If they do have a say prior to investment, then why not raise capital and hire people of that caliber regardless?

If the issue is that some founders with good ideas are simply clueless and a team that knows better must be built around them, it seems conflict between the CEO and the new team will be inevitable.

My go to recommendations:

http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Scientific-Revolutions-50th-... - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, (1996)

http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master... - The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas (1999)

Things I've liked in the last 6 months:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Busin... - How to Measure Anything, Douglas Hubbard (2007)

http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineerin... - Mythical Man Month: Essays in Software Engineering, Frederick Brooks Jr. (1975, but get the 1995 version)

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/00... - Good To Great, Jim Collins (2001)

Next on my reading list (and I'm really excited about it):

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Interface-No-brilliant-technology... - The Best Interface is No Interface, Golden Krishna (2015)

and try to see how practical tips both give for decision making. Art of War is also good, but I'd prefer Clausewitz since it's much more straightforward.

And read this masterpiece
http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/reports-downloads/the-testa...

  * What are you deeply passionate about?  
  * What can you be the best in the world at?  
  * What drives your economic engine?

Much of the entrepreneur blogosphere would go up in a puff of smoke if people would simply read the business books that stand the test of time.

The mantra seems to be "when you have great sales, you can commit many sins". Not exactly the best motivator for an ethical institution.

An alternative, and more effective sales methodology IMHO, is Jim Collin's "Good to Great" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great

You may agree or disagree with my views, but if you're a company that fires the bottom 10% on a regular schedule, I can promise you this: I will never work for you.

And of course I'll add the obligatory mention of Squeezed Books, which is more or less based on business books I've bought and enjoyed (although there are also others like Good to Great that I wouldn't recommend).

Jim Collins, in Good to Great ( http://tinyurl.com/ypwu8a ) comes out against rock star CEO's, saying that those who turned the companies he studied around were decidedly not rock stars. He has a term for these people, "level 5 leaders", which to me sounds like some kind of weird cult mumbo jumbo, but his point is well taken.

Even The Economist has had a number of editorials lately saying that pay should better respect performance. For instance:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9257618

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9257830

1. Follow people in the same field
2. Ready up on blogs and posts : I use Zite, Flipboard and medium
3. A book that helped me to a large extent is Good to great by Jim Collins (http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/00...)

Also The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman http://www.amazon.com/Personal-MBA-World-Class-Business-Educ...

4. Video from people in the same field.
5. This article https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/50-articles-and-books-that-wi...

Some great tools:

1. Trello - Project/product and pretty much manage any thing
2. Qlikview - Data Analysis : Excel on Steroids

It's a very short list, but I am learning on the job :)

I always wondered how that strategy was faring once grocery stores started including pharmacies.

If there was any doubt this practice of having a small confined environment with clear metrics and feedback and iterating against it relentlessly was a Pattern of Success... Hmm.. Very enlightening.

This is what makes case studies about product success so difficult. With so many factors involved, any bold proclamation like "Price before product" is bound to have enough prominent counterexamples to render it useless in application.

Studies like this always remind me of Jim Collins' "Good to Great" controversy where several of the heralded companies went bankrupt a few years after the book was published.

Setting a good price before releasing a product is a lot easier said than done. Particularly for startup products which may not have great reference points. People are also generally not that good at figuring out what they're willing to pay for something.

I take "Price before product" as simply a catchy reminder to "think about price" as part of the long list of product requirements.

The real way to get through this isn't by trying to be happy. That is a shallow goal destined to fail. I remember reading about how that actually killed people in the story of Hanoi Hilton from the book Good To Great.

Instead be productive. Build something, write something, or help someone. Stay active. Go jogging or exercise. Set realistic goals, crush them, and then set more goals.

Things could be far worse. The whole world could be crumbling around you. You could be isolated in a holocaust death camp. You could one day lose everything. Bad things happen to good people. As bad as things could get people still find a way to make the best of it. What's important is that you accept the reality that is and how you move forward and stay focused.

It suggests that some of the best run companies are run by non-charismatic CEOs--I agree with that. Read it and make up your own mind. Or don't, but come off the whole "That book will poison your mind" thing.

There've been countless times when I purchased a heavily advertised (well reviewed) book, only to find out that it was worthless piece of ... Anyways, those books weren't written for me; they repeated the same stuff over and over and over again.

One example - Good to Great. The first chapter is good, so is the second (maybe). Everything afterwards is just a repetition of the same concept. If I could see ahead of time that most readers stop reading the book 20% in, I'd make my assumptions and not even bother to try to get through it.

Likewise, there are books where the first chapters are quite tedious to read, but the rest are great. If, while reading chapter 1, I could see that most people struggled but then persisted and loved the book, that might encourage me to get going.

Just my 2 cents.

Communications is another area I'm planning on focusing on. I've very solid written communication skills, so I plan to mainly focus on verbal skills. I've one or two in-person workshops/courses I'm considering for this, as well as potentially joining toastmasters due to their great reputation.

Putting focus on the above areas plus seeking targeted feedback more rigorously should, I believe, help me grow considerably.

Networking is difficult, I have to admit. Not because I'm unapproachable or fear approaching others, but I've found a lot of tech meetups are either very technology specific, or where they're not they're jammed with recruiters, people looking for jobs or people looking to simply sell you something.

Apologies for the delayed reply. What are your thoughts, since you ask?

Any promise of eventually being the smarter move due to ownership or profit share is not worth it. Only 1 in 10 startups is likely to exist at the 10 year mark, and the majority of those still won't be well funded or be issuing dividends. Working for a startup is roughly similar to playing the lottery, somebody is going to win and it won't be you.

To your point FAANG companies used to be the worst career option because managerial expectations were impossible, but that ended almost a decade ago. If anything, FAANG companies will likely be among the first to even implement a 30 hour 4 day work week in the next 10 years for the same salary as the 40 hour 5 day work week. It's getting batter to work for an established company, and most of the bad managers that insisted on making the working environment terrible are now running the startups.

After years of research the clearest conclusion about who you should work for should always be answered by who has the best management team. Good managers enable work life balance, compensate above average and rarely dictate how to get things done. They should be more interested in making you valuable than whether you plan to stick around, and all of this is supported by real research into successful management techniques (See books like Good to Great, Team of Teams and The Goal for supporting reference materials).

"While many stock analysts thought that, as the provider of home mortgages, Fannie Mae's success would be completely determined by the spread in changing interest rates, Collins tells us that Fannie Mae realized that the key to Fannie Mae's market-independent success was not in the ratio of profitability per mortgage. Rather, Fannie Mae could become the world leader in understanding mortgage risk levels and profit by insuring that risk. Fannie Mae's key ratio became profitability per mortgage risk level."

http://www.thinkinglike.com/Essays/Good-To-Great-Lessons.htm...

- Currency Wars, James Rickards

- The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

- What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly

- The Art Of Happiness, Dalai Lama

- Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen

- The Four Agreements, Miguel Ruiz

- Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl

- Understanding Power, Noam Chomsky

- The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

- Good To Great, Jim Collins

- Abundance, Peter Diamandis

- The Mystery Of Capital, Hernando De Soto

- Pathologies Of Power, Paul Farmer

- Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff

- Seeing Like A State, James Scott

- Ishmael, Daniel Quinn

- Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman

- Beyond Fear, Bruce Schneier

- The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

- The Birth Of Plenty, William Bernstein

Subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Financial times. Read as much of them as you can.

As far as books go, I recently put together a business reading list, here are some that you may find interesting:

The E-Myth revisited (note: this is e as in entrepreneur, not e-commerce, basically it's about building a franchise and enabling yourself to focus "on the business," that is, making it better, advertising, managing, rather than "in the business" which for programmers would be programming...)

Built to last : successful habits of visionary companies (note: some of them have failed)

Confronting reality : doing what matters to get things right (haven't started reading this one yet, funny huh)

An empire of wealth : the epic history of American economic power (haven't started)

Good to great : why some companies make the leap--and others don't (some weren't so great)

An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, by Smith, Adam, 1723-1790. (goodness, this is 300 years old and still dead on and an easy read)

Microtrends : the small forces behind tomorrow's big changes (haven't started reading yet)

Negotiate like the pros : a top sports negotiator's lessons for making deals, building relationships, and getting what you want (good book, especially if you know anything about sports, which I don't, but still enjoy reading)

Who : the A method for hiring (This is a good one for helping to find talented people to join your team, short easy read)

Why we make mistakes : how we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average (haven't started reading yet)

For every person you point to and say grit and perseverance made them successful, I'll point to ten who failed despite grit and perseverance.

From reading some of the comments here, it sounds like DSC's razors are not nearly as good as Gillette's and they are able to sell razors mostly because of their marketing, which confirms what I had thought about new players coming in. I was less skeptical of Harry's because they specifically including messages in their marketing about how they took over an existing manufacture.

Here's my personal favourite, from when Mozilla dropped MNG support: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574#c672

I remember being upset that MNG was removed. I never used it, but I might have! Maybe! And an extra 300kb or so isn't really that much, is it? And you can just drop it in instead of libPNG, there probably won't be any security or compatibility problems, and if there are they'll be easy to fix, right? I'm sure the other browsers will support it soon.

Hard to be the bad guy, I guess, but you guys are doing the right thing. Have you read Jim Collins' Good to Great? Look up "rinsing your cheese".

For one thing, retrospectives often come at a time when everyone has been busting ass for a long time and they just want to go home. If you put it off till next week then it seems like another distraction.

Like the planning meetings, the timebox for a retrospective is often wrong. In some cases things went smoothly and there is a little to say. That is where you should be. In some places you budgeted 45 minutes but there really is a day worth of material.

On top of that in many (most?) firms there is no sense of psychological safety. Often the real message is that the process is 99% bull but you can't say that in a meeting which is claimed to be about continuous improvement but is really about how to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic.

In his book "Good to Great", Jim Collins points out the use of the word "alignment" is a bad smell. In a healthy organization there is alignment, naturally, built into it. If you feel like you have to paint alignment onto it after the fact you are just causing more misalignment.

"Working hard", by itself, isn't enough to get you rich, and it can often take you entirely in the wrong direction. You can work your ass off and read business books like "Good to Great" or techie books like "Programming Collective Intelligence" (which I bought and think is good), and 10 years later you can still be sitting on your couch, watching TV, thinking "I worked hard, why am I still not a rock star?" I can work my ass off and implement a new Web application in 3 hours, but if nobody uses it I'm still a failure, at least in an entrepreneurial sense.

For every effect there is a logical sequence of causes. If you want to launch a successful company, you have to follow a finite sequence of steps (think of idea, write good code, listen to user feedback, etc.). There is an infinite pool of actions that are NOT part of the sequence of steps that will not help you AT ALL towards starting a great company. The really challenging (yet necessary) part is figuring out what these useless activities are, and avoiding them.

Figure out what exactly is necessary and do those things. Don't BS yourself and think "if I just work hard at these X things that everyone else says are important, I will some day make it big."

But I think even if you've figured out exactly what you need to do, a lot of ENERGY and ACTION is needed. Nothing important gets done without a lot of action.

"Working hard" is a bad term, because it sort of implies having a miserable time. I love tennis. When I play tennis I'm running all over the court and diving to make tough shots. I'm exhausted after a match. But I don't consider this working hard, I consider it high-energy playing. I think it's important to not only choose an end result you want, but also to find a process/means for getting to that end result that is so enjoyable that it doesn't seem like working hard at all, but rather like a high-energy game of tennis.

You will find once you've closed that your investors keep pushing for traction at the cost of everything else including revenue and burn rate.

This is because, from their perspective, they want you to create a market for your stock. Which is now also their stock. They want you to do this the same way you created a market when they wanted to buy. With traction.

There are several target markets for your stock. Future angel and VC investors. The public markets through an IPO. An acquisition. Traction is good at creating interest in all of these [less so for an IPO].

You can be a very effective CEO from your investors perspective if you spend your career in your startup doing the things that are best at creating a market for your stock. This approach has the highest likelihood of creating a successful outcome in the shortest time for your investors.

However, you can not use this approach to build a lasting business or a great business. When your target market becomes investors and your product becomes your stock, you are not only neglecting the fundamentals of building a lasting business - you are working against them.

But the reality of the world we live in is that you occasionally need to raise money. So you need to somehow resolve this conflict which I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Recommended reading: Jim Collins - Good to Great.

Recommended viewing: Boiler Room

I would recommend Drive by Dan Pink if you're interested in learning more about creative motivation. It's pretty short, and actually very well summarised here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is very good programmer-specific management material. They cite a lot of work benchmarking the productivity of different workplaces, so it's very "x is good, x is bad".

Jim Collins' Good to Great is an examination of businesses that succeed vs fail, and the attributes that get them there, it's essentially an extended summary of a longitudinal study he and his team did of businesses that outperformed the stock market by a high factor over 10 years. It's more leadership than management, but still very useful.

One that I haven't read yet (damn my stupidly big reading list) but recommend on reputation alone is First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Here's a summary: http://www.slideshare.net/gregcrouch/executive-summary-first...

I share your frustration about blah-blah blog posts. With the exception of First, Break All The Rules (which I haven't read yet) and 7 Habits (which I forgive because it's so damn good), the books I mention are based on actual research which is cited in the book, not just some dude going "I think this because I know stuff". Because they're books for busy people, they have summaries and bolded sections and callout boxes too. :)

Overall, though, I would caution you to not put the cart before the horse. There are a thousand books on management that could teach you something new, but it will all just go on the big pile of irrelevant information unless you actually need it. You won't unless you're actively trying to manage. If you start by spending that time you'll be much better placed to contextualise the knowledge and, therefore, actually benefit from it.

It's not that what he's saying is not true, it's that you don't get the whole picture, because actually giving you the whole picture would take a whole lot more time to research and wouldn't be half as entertaining.

The best example are the "Good to Great" series of books that espouse what companies should to be successful, neglecting to mention that the majority of the companies held up as examples from the previous book have somehow spectacularly failed. The books aren't predictive because they're based on an extremely flawed methodology that cherry-picks data to fit pre-conceived notions.

Also, success on the scale that most people reading these books aspire to requires a huge amount of luck no matter how hard you work, what short and long-term goals you create, or how early you wake up every day to run four miles.

But most people won't read books titled "Preparing For Modest Success from a Lifetime of Hard Work and Saving" or "Success Secrets: Being Lucky."

CEOs with integrity in the face of public persecution are very rare.

The next guy to replace him could be someone that will sink the Mozilla ship.

> Leadership is taking responsibility and owning your actions.

You are implying that it is a fact that his actions are wrong, when it's simply an opinion.

The idea makes sense if you think about it. You're liable to get less accomplished if you spend most of your time covering yourself and positioning for your own advancement. The same applies to everyone else. The hard part, then, is identifying and removing people who waste a lot of time covering themselves and positioning to the detriment of what they're nominally being compensated to do.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others/dp/00...

- Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (translated into modern English).

- PG's "Hackers and Painters" (why I joined this forum).

- Tim Ferris's "Four Hour Work Week" (has to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, but has many very helpful and practical tips and ideas.)

- "Mastery" by George Leonard

- "Good to Great" by Jim Collins

And finally (and I don't want to turn this into a political flamewar, "grain of salt" applies here as well, etc, etc) but the book that had the most influence on me was "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Unlike all the others on the list above, it's a work of fiction, but I think it is the best at capturing and romanticizing the joy and euphoria that you feel when you build something that works.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias (excuse the mobile link)

Make sure you have documented what issues and risks you have expressed to the PM and Lead Developer - maybe actually in whatever tool you are using, or at least in email. Make a record that team's morale is decreasing.

You and each of your team members should directly be telling the PM and Lead Developer that you are worried with specific risks or issues.

Take the registers to somebody with more authority in your organisation. Come in with a few recommendations. Present the facts and tell them you think there's a problem, and ask if they agree or not. If they do agree, make sure to get what the next action will be.

Just my immediate thoughts. Good luck.

Sometimes, "when" happens early on, sometimes a CEO manages a 20 or 30 year career, and then "when" comes much later when a successor is named. Other times, "when" comes in the form of a sale of the company.

But, it's always when, never if. Part of the CEO's duty is to prepare for the when, to make sure it happens in the right way at the right time.

There are many business books that cover this topic, but "Good to Great" is a recommendation if you haven't read it already. There are a few good examples of cases where the CEO was the entire company, which in the end is a sign of poor leadership and management skills.

All of the people lauding accolades on Zuckerberg sort of surprise me. He has done little more than ride the wave of social networking on a chance. Don't get me wrong, he has done better than others, but so far I have not really seen any indicators of visionary leadership or great forethought from him. And back to my first comment, his recent interview doesn't do anything to enhance his image.

One business book that actually applied hard data analysis to look for causality across multiple companies is "Good to Great" by Jim Collins.

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780066620992/good-to-great