Six Business Books to Read in 2016

We asked staff here at Northeast Ohio Growth to share the best business books they have read this year. Check out their selections:

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded and Updated)

The new expanded edition of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek includes:

– More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point.
– Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating e-mail, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than $8 a meal.
– How Lifestyle Design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times.
– The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either.

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

A new generation of megabrands like Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Twitter haven’t spent a dime on traditional marketing. No press releases, no TV commercials, no billboards. Instead, they rely on a new strategy—growth hacking—to reach many more people despite modest marketing budgets. Growth hackers have thrown out the old playbook and replaced it with tools that are testable, trackable, and scalable. They believe that products and businesses should be modified repeatedly until they’re primed to generate explosive reactions.

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

“Holiday is part Machiavelli, part Ogilvy, and all results…this whiz kid is the secret weapon you’ve never heard of.” –Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek

“This is an astonishing book. Holiday has worked for several years as a self-proclaimed media manipulator, running campaigns for companies such as American Apparel. He is now intent on revealing the tricks that his kind use to influence us. Many of these stories are chilling.”
–Gillian Tett, Financial Times

The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization

This is a book about how employees of the future will work, how managers will lead, and what organizations of the future will look like.
The Future of Work will help you:
– Stay ahead of the competition
– Create better leaders
– Tap into the freelancer economy
– Attract and retain top talent
– Rethink management
– Structure effective teams
– Embrace flexible work environments
– Adapt to the changing workforce
– Build the organization of the future

The book features uncommon examples and easy to understand concepts which will challenge and inspire you to work differently.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t. The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice.