27 Book Summaries for Leaders in Growing Companies
I am Sanket. That's me here => https://twitter.com/sanketnadhani
I have been working at growing companies for over a decade, first at FusionCharts as the Head of Marketing and now at Wingify (makers of VWO) as the Director of New Products.
The challenges at the growth stage are very different from the startup stage—around managing teams, organizational design, strategy, goal setting frameworks and creating repeatable innovation models. While there is a lot of literature around the web on how to start up, there's not a lot of it on the pain points of a growing company.
I have gone through hundreds of books, eBooks, articles, videos, interviews, talks and podcasts, some of them well known classics like High Output Management and Good Strategy Bad Strategy, most of them relatively lesser-known like Growth Factory and Ten Types of Innovation to find the answers to the challenges of growing companies.
And while going through these resources, I have diligently made notes of everything I found valuable in Evernote so I can go back to it, read it again, think over it in my current context (the same literature can have completely different interpretations at different points in time), and really internalize it. It takes a lot of time and pain but what’s the point of reading something if I am not going to remember it for more than a day? And those tiny details really do add up.
In this eBook, I have put together summaries from 27 resources that I have found most valuable in my career spanning over 100 pages.
Here are the 27 resources I have summarized in this book:
1. High Output Management
2. IDEO on Rituals
3. Managing Unconscious Bias from Facebook
4. First, Break All the Rules
5. Netflix Culture Deck
6. The Amazon Way
7. How Google Works
8. The 4 Disciplines of Execution
9. The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work
10. The Hard Thing About Hard Things
11. Ten Types of Innovation
12. How X Innovates
13. Building a Growth Factory
14. The Rising Need for Innovation Speed—BCG
15. Growth and Innovation within an Organization
16. Hidden in Plain Sight
17. Good Strategy Bad Strategy
18. Essential Scrum
19. Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done
20. Gamification by Design
21. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
22. Designing B2B Brands
23. Traction
24. Evangelist Marketing
25. Sapiens
26. The Rise and Fall of Nations
27. The Industries of the Future
You can check out these summaries to get a taste of what's in the book:
- The Amazon Way: https://medium.com/@sanketnadhani/the-amazon-way-my-notes-d9b309110e4f
- How Google Works: https://medium.com/@sanketnadhani/how-google-works-my-notes-32ad716e923c
- Building a Growth Factory: https://medium.com/@sanketnadhani/building-a-growth-factory-summary-775bd912108a
- Ten Types of Innovation: https://medium.com/@sanketnadhani/ten-types-of-innovation-my-notes-37f514602519
- Hidden in Plain Sight: https://medium.com/@sanketnadhani/hidden-in-plain-sight-my-notes-86a7adf1bf62