Reuters/Lucas Jackson
What is the best business book you have read? Stanford GSB alumni share their top picks:
The Filter Bubble
By Eli Pariser
–Susan Akbarpour (MBA ’11), founder and CEO of Mavatar
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
By Ben Horowitz
“Unless you’ve done it, you just don’t have enough empathy around what it means to build a company. You have the least number of people to talk to but you need it the most. The decisions are not black and white. There is so much gray.”
–Dennis Yang (MBA ’02), CEO at Udemy
The Everything Store
By Brad Stone
“I loved it as entrepreneur therapy. It’s helpful to look at a company that has become so successful and peer behind the curtain to see how much adversity even Amazon had to deal with in the beginning when they were getting the business off the ground. I find that reading about the struggles of other entrepreneurs has a way of helping me keep seemingly very similar challenges of my own in perspective.”
–Jonathan Beekman (MBA ’09), founder and CEO of Man Crates
First Things First
By Stephen R. Covey
“Being a CEO requires goal setting and prioritization. Most startups die from indigestion, not starvation. I do an exercise every week with a friend of mine. At 8:30 every Sunday we go through our ‘first things first’ things for the week. We put it on a spreadsheet and we are accountable to each other. Each week we check in to see how we did against our previous week’s goals and set new goals for the following week. In addition to work, I pick one or two things to do with my wife and my kids that will be special. I’ve been doing this for six years. Setting aside time in your calendar to stop, reflect, and plan is really important.”
–Josh Becker (JD/MBA ’98), CEO of Lex Machina
The Power of Now
By Eckhart Tolle
–Ai Chloe Chien (MBA ’13), cofounder and COO of Homemade Cooking
Value Proposition Design
By Alexander Osterwalder
–Ai Chloe Chien (MBA ’13), cofounder and COO of Homemade Cooking
High Output Management
By Andrew S. Grove
–Tony Xu (MBA ’13), cofounder and CEO of DoorDash
Zero to One
By Peter Thiel
–Tony Xu (MBA ’13), cofounder and CEO of DoorDash
Losing My Virginity
By Richard Branson
–Emrecan Dogan (MBA ’10), founder and CEO of ScoreBeyond
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