Part of “The Indian Business” Box set, ‘Rokda’ focuses on five Baniya businessmen who have disrupted their respective industries. The book sheds light on the story of Emami, Snapdeal, Meru, Hindware, and Bansal classes.
The book is a light read for the enthusiasts who want to know the stories. Do not expect any deep insight about the community or the style of doing business.
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I had read about Bill Campbell, who had mentored several Silicon Valley founding teams, and when I learned this book was about him, I could not wait to get it and start reading.
Quite unlike several other books, where the authors are working closely to put across their ideas, this one was more a tribute to their coach. Eric, along with Jonathan Rosenberg and Anal Eagle, takes you through their experience and the experiences of several others who had benefitted from the coach’s direction in their lives. Filled with several anecdotal stories, this book sheds light on what the authors feel were the key principles with which Coach Campbell operated.
I find this a lovely read, which I guess I would like to go back to several times over the years to learn how to deal with people.
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One of the rare books that I have read about scaling up of ventures. Written by a behavioral economist and an academician, John A. List, this book integrates the scaling challenges and the experimental rigor in its writing. I loved this.
Building on his personal experience of working with Uber and then later Lyft, John touches up on several aspects that would be helpful when one is trying to understand the venture scaling from a relative distance. He highlights several key conditions for scaling, like the ingredient’s vs. the chef, the challenge of false positives, spillovers, the role of incentives, knowing when to pull the plug, and many more aspects.
If you are grappling with trying to understand what some of the conditions could be that could answer if it is the time to scale and what you would need as ingredients before you start, this book will give you some of the answers.
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I had been listening to Reid Hoffman’s podcast with the same title—the Masters of Scale—for nearly a year and felt there may be something more that I would get from this book. But I must admit, I was a bit disappointed while I read through the book. Most of the book talks about similar lessons that have been shared in the podcast, and this book gives very little additional insight or analysis that I would have loved to see from Hoffman, where he has a more elaborate canvas to detail out.
I must admit, this could be my bias given the years I have put into the entrepreneurial ecosystem here. You may also find the book interesting if you have not heard the podcast as well.
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An exceptionally quick and handy read for those who are in the early stages of your startup journey. If you are thinking of following the lean startup approach of conducting qualitative interviews with your potential customers, this book is a must-read.
Of all the examples and learnings he shares, I love the mom and son conversation, which I borrow into my classrooms (mostly my MBA classes) to explain the importance of listening to customers before you sell the solution. The book is embedded with several nuggets of learning for the early stages of an entrepreneur.
I would recommend this one for all early-stage entrepreneurs.
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One of my quests is about how organizational cultures get formed. My search got me to this handy book, which I suggest entrepreneurs do read—preferably early on in their venture so that they give themselves the time to build the organizational culture and allow for its development before they get to the growth phase where it’s the recruits and culture that would take over more of what they are doing through direct intervention.
Daniel in The Culture Code breaks down the process of forming a culture for successful groups into three phases. The first emphasizes building safety into the culture, allowing for people to develop trust. The second emphasizes the role of sharing vulnerability in building the exchanges that would allow for trust to strengthen within the team and develop cooperation among the teams. And lastly, the role purposes play in the continuation of the group performance once the team culture has begun to take root.
I would recommend this one for all early-stage entrepreneurs.
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This book by Nikhil was sponsored by the Marico Innovation Foundation to study the scaling up of eight organizations to emerge as the top player in their own fields. No, it was not intentional that I went out searching for another book by Nikhil Inamdar the same year. It is just one of the coincidences.
Given the mandate of talking about these eight ventures, I think Nikhil has done a great job of presenting the stories of the eight ventures. I loved reading the stories of the following eight companies in the book: Tanbo Imaging, Goonj, Rivigo, ISRO, Forus Health, Agastya International Foundation, The Better India, and St Judes.
The academician in me, however, began asking the question, so what? What could we extract from these eight that we could generalize? This is one layer that I would have loved to see in this book. I understand it may not have been the objective of the book, but I feel it would have given it a sense of direction having read the stories.
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I have known Nagaraja Prakasam (Naga) since 2014, when he became the resident mentor at NSRCEL. He used to regularly sit at the “Naga Tree” close to IIMB and mentor startups who came to see him. Over the years he has invested in several of startups, and a recent post of his where he mentioned his debut book won the GLF-WWF Green Honours award suggested the count stood at 18. The book focuses on building how Naga is helping build a sustainable future through his work with entrepreneurs and several ecosystem enablers.
I had not purchased the book and had been postponing that, but Naga was keen on developing a course on social entrepreneurship and sought some assistance. When I mentioned I had not yet read his book, he got it couriered right away. I finished reading the book—actually, the book is a breeze to read—and written in simple language.
I believe the book is inspired by “My Experiments with Truth” (MET by Mahatma Gandhi). Naga does mention the impact this book had on him, but in here I feel the style also seems to mostly match. MET shares several experiments that Gandhiji had conducted in his pursuit of truth; in here, Naga shares a lot of these interactions with social entrepreneurs, enterprises, and life-altering conversations. As a reader you will know Naga more closely—the thoughts that motivate him and the perspective he carries.
I, however, felt the number of experiences he shares was a bit too many to my liking. As someone who has been used to thinking and working with and towards some framework, I felt this section has been missing from the book. I wish several of the thoughts could be structured to create a pathway for others to refer to. But that is also possibly not Naga’s fault. It is me as an academician looking for generalization— as a reader, you may be perfectly fine with the rich stories he shares.
Get your copy from here: https://amzn.in/d/4v44fKr
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I recently completed reading the book “Business Model Innovation Strategy: Transformational Concepts and Tools for Entrepreneurial Leaders” by Raphael Amit and Christoph Zott and thought of resuming my age-old habit of writing up book reviews.
I had picked up this book to read for two reasons:
1. First, as a mentor, I generally prefer using the business models as a background framework (while sprucing it with the concepts from effectuation and the lean start-up method) when I am working with early-stage venture ideas. I felt there could be something this book could contribute additionally to my practice.
2. And second, as an academician, I have extensively studied some of the papers that Amit and Zott have been developing as a stream of literature on business models. I was curious to observe how they would stitch their years of academic work into a book that a broader audience would read.
I feel the book has done justice to the academic work on which it has built its help, and I see a lot of integration with several strands of literature from strategy, innovation, effectuation, opportunity discovery, lean, and many more. This got me to enjoy the book as an academic reader.
Wearing the practitioners’ hat, the book does a decent job of communicating the broad ideas and seems to have structured the flow well. The numerous examples are well placed in illustrating the concepts. However, I would have liked a few linkages to tools and material that would have elaborated the ideas for application. In some ways, I feel the book let go of the chance of delivering a higher value to the practitioner audience as the blue-ocean strategy had done. I guess this may have been because the practitioner variant of business models had come into the market several years ago, as the book – Business Model Generation.
Personally, for me this book has provided some useful concepts that in collate my desperate thoughts from my application during mentoring sessions, and also highlighted new ideas of how I could present some of my learning to the audience of entrepreneurs. I promise to work on this one soon.
Overall, I think if you are willing to do the hard work to connect the concepts to the application. This book is a good read. Otherwise, it leaves a wide-open space for practitioners like me to extend its application and utility into our own domain areas.
I got my copy of the book from: https://amzn.in/d/6xVSMgN
Happy Reading!