The best Business Teams eBooks: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The New One Minute Manager is a great book. In it the book talks about finding employees doing something right. We always look for and reprimand employees for doing things wrong. But never enough of complimenting them when they are doing it right. We just expect that and it's unfair.

It's a good short read.

A true classic business book might help your thinking here -- there are sections about meetings and one-on-ones -- it's called High Output Management by Andy Grove and it's exceptionally cleanly and simply written. And it won't take you too long either. It has quite a following and that following is well deserved. It's a classic for a reason. I think it could help you as it has many others.

> Extreme Ownership.

For those who have not read this book yet, it is worth it

This guy needs to understand the "mirror principal" as outlined in the Jim Collins book Good to Great.

If he truly wants to lead, he must take ownership. This is a great book on the topic.

Speaking about your business/niche specifically, you will learn more through experience than you ever will through reading or watching YouTube or taking online courses.

That said, there are a lot of skills you need as a business owner that don't have anything to do with the product or service you are selling. The one thing most new entrepreneurs don't realize is that you won't actually be spending all that much of your time doing the technical aspects of your business - or at least you shouldn't. As a business owner you also have to do the legal parts (setting up the business entity, getting insurance, navigating hiring/firing employees, etc), financial parts (setting up bank accounts, bookkeeping, reviewing financial reports, etc), advertising & marketing, customer service, even cleaning the toilets.

If you really want to change your mindset and start thinking more like an entrepreneur and less like an employee, read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. On the financial side of things, read Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs.

Without knowing more about what type of business you want to start, I really can't offer much more advice than just get started.

I'd highly suggest getting hold of the Tom DeMarco book Peopleware (get the most recent, Third Edition). It's about the working environment for technical/creative workers, and deals with issues concerning the office environment. The Kindle edition is under $20, and you'll be able to read it immediately.

You remind me of someone who is unwilling to take personal responsibility. You make extreme analogies regarding being forced to buy bread or go hungry... buddy you don't live in Soviet Russia.... This is America... people literally build boats of trash to leave their hellish situation to get to this place.

You state that you want to know a legal way of getting out of the agreement you freely made. That's a fine question, but you don't seem to be satisfied with any response. You seem to delight in arguing and debating, as if that will change your situation. It won't.

You also seem to enjoy taking the position of the oppressed, and victimized. Stop that. It won't help. You aren't a victim.

I read your profile. You make SUCH GOOD money, that you are no longer able to contribute to a ROTH IRA... Bro... you make more money than me, and many of the other posters in this thread. And yet you still are trying to figure out a way to weasel out of a freely entered into contract.... and now you are saying you are prepared to take a credit hit.

If you do take a credit hit, know this. It will not just hurt your credit, it will haunt you for at least the next 7 years. It will come up every time you try to move into a new place. Heck it is even starting to become a thing with employment. You don't want that. I don't want that for you, or the people you do business with.

Additionally, you are looking into buying a 4-plex. Brother, I wish you the best of luck with such endeavors. Once YOU have the problem of the Landlord, I do believe you will change your tone rather quickly. And I believe you'll be able to see things from an emotionally and financially different perspective.

Here is a book recommendation: Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink.

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs-ebook/dp/B0739PYQSS

Just for fun, how much responsibility (on average) do you take when your company, your country, your children, your friends, etc fuck up?

It's typical now to blame others and not take any responsibility. but guess what, if you are russian, your daily work via taxes is funding this war, it's russians attacking ukranians, I could go on and on, so of course you can frame it like "poor russians against the war, they cannot do anything", I say BS, they could have done a million things and they still can,

Here's a book for little bitches, idk, maybe it changes your perspective
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0739PYQSS/ref=dbs\_a\_def\_rwt\_bibl\_vppi\_i0

This book helped me identify the cast of characters inside my mind and figure out which ones I should listen to.

I'm not a big self-help book reader, but this one was a good read for me. Those little assholes can talk all they want. I'm capable of ignoring them now, and over time they have learned to just be quiet.

That drunk is really loud right now, though. He's pissed off!

I'll crack open EFFICIENCY IN LEARNING and see what I can find. 2nd music factoid: As I recall DeMarco and Lister who measured programmer productivity noted that programmers who listened to music were more than twice as likely to miss that a programming task outputs the input. I think that is in PEOPLEWARE. Peopleware is also great for knowledge worker productivity. You need a large desk to spread work out on etc.

The Managers Path is a great resource. It walks you from being an IC, a tech lead, EM, director, and a VP of engineering by describing the people responsibilities for each level and describes tools you can use to be effective at each.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XP3GJ7F/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_M1GQTXJHQ04HABWPT6RT

Best of luck on your journey!

Sounds bloody horrible!

I'm a "head of engineering" and i don't "order anybody around", and would be horrified of any of my leads or managers did that. Their job is to enable people, ensure they have what they need, are adequately trained and mentored... Not to boss them around!!

Have a read of this to see how a proper manager should behave

https://www.amazon.com.au/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growth-ebook/dp/B06XP3GJ7F

I'm going to be blunt with you - you are not ready for this. I don't care if you're the second coming of Donald Knuth. You simply haven't had enough time wrestling with unique problems, making architectural decisions, and so on to be a competent developer. You should not be excited. You should be terrified and you should have said no.

Since you are in this position, lead from behind. Take advice from your team. Do what seems reasonable. Focus on being an excellent leader of people and avoid imposing your will on the team. Stay humble and continue devouring all you can on good software design practices.

And read Peopleware.

The program focuses on Positive Intelligence. It includes watching a weekly video (done by Shrizad Charmine) to learn the concepts and doing daily exercises to train your brain to recognize your saboteurs and lean into your sage. We gathered weekly for an hour via zoom to discuss with a pod of like minded people and our coach facilitating and coaching us. There is a book on Amazon if you want to go it alone or just check it out. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007R0IQ70/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_PAB0Fb2Y9EA0X Feel free to DM me if you want more info.

Extreme Ownership

Start with the premise that everything is your fault, use hindsight to figure out what you should have done to prevent the bad situation, then change your current actions to prevent a similar situation from occurring in the future

You say that the relationship with management matters more than whatever other factors you think you are superior in? Good, now you know what to work on.'

Deal with the situation on the ground as it is, instead of whining about how you wish it was.

> (“Perfect is the enemy of good.”)

I have nothing to add, but it's interesting that this saying (with minor tweaks) can be used in both directions i.e., Good to Great

> Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

I found this to be an excellent overview about the key responsibilities, attitudes and strategies for dealing with the increasingly senior positions that you might hold in your career:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XP3GJ7F/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

For me, the sections from tech lead onwards was critical in understanding not only my own role, but that of those above me from my manager right up to the CTO.

I'd recommend this book to everyone, and it's one of the few books that I can say has genuinely changed how I look at my career.

Manager's Path is a really good book about different levels of management, and Debugging Teams is a series of examples from the author's histories that can easily apply to your new position.

While its not exactly a singular person in the story, the book "From Good to Great" by Jim Collins analyzes companies over a span of 20-30 years that were considered the underdog in their field to becoming the flagship for their market.

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Others-ebook/dp/B0058DRUV6

I always recommend the E-Myth Revisited. I think its critical to the proper mindset of being a business owner, but that's just me.

First mistake. Not everyone with an inspect problem will be your customer

You need to define your market: are you going to be the cheapest prices provider it will result in you going into low income dumpy houses and those customers are not going to pay as much and complain the most. Take up a lot of your time for lower margins and no money for marketing

Or to you shoot for the top 30% of the market and charge higher prices with better guarantees and work with income earners with 100-200k per year jobs and can afford to have you out 3 times a year like clockwork to keep the spiders away?

Every technician goes through this as an employee

The boss is getting rich off my back

Means while he’s working 70 hours a week keeping the schedule full to provide you with a stable income. Takes all the risk

When you go out and spray aware winning petunias

You boss is the one to fork over the settlement

Great ambition to want to start our own business. But don’t do it because you think your boss is getting rich. Because you will be sadly mistaken.

And what appears easy for him now was years of blood sweat and tears

Source : 20 year hvac technician turned business owner 9 years ago with 2 employee 1000s of customers and problems that nobody seems to want

Shit I can’t even give the business away. And yes it’s profitable but everyone wants to go home at 5pm

Go read the emyth by Micheal gerber

And then come back and I would be happy to answer anymore of your questions

https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About-ebook/dp/B000RO9VJK

It would be helpful if your bookkeeper uses Xero or Quickbooks online so you can see the numbers at any given point.

I highly suggest you have your books done once a year by a CPA if you don't already.

Make sure both the CPA and bookkeeper have restaurant experience as they can pay for themselves if they know what they are doing. The opposite is true as well.

Have you read The E-myth Revisited? I highly suggest you follow the advice herein. tl;dr systematize everything like you were trying to sell a franchise.

I’ve found the ebook on Amazon for those who would be also interested.

Thanks for your recommendation!

<em>The One Minute Manager</em> remains relevant and useful. It sure helped me when I was new.

For the hospitality industry, <em>Setting the Table</em> by Danny Meyer is outstanding. I think it has applications for any business that has a customer base.

Nah, we're "small time", but we're still doing great. The company has been around for over a decade and it's been slowly expanding. When I joined a few years ago there were maybe 20 people, now there's double that. Management has purposefully implemented strategies that would grow the company slowly, so we can handle new demand. They spent considerable time studying this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others-ebook/dp/B0058DRUV6

Where it basically takes a look at companies who got ahead of themselves by taking in too many customers when they weren't ready for it. So far so good. :)

Ben Horowitz's book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" addresses lots of these problems and is definitely a great book to read when you are in a leadership position. His comment on firing people is make them understand why they underperformed and refer it to the expectations. Lead the conversation in a way so that they would actually fire themselves. And absolutely do it in a one-on-one meeting. In your case I would build on empathy and discuss everything with him and depart on good terms so he would of course also bring back the company equipment since it's not his (hopefully managed in your contract).

I had a whole thing written out and I did something and it was gone, so I am going to try and remember what I had written.

I think one of the most important things is not to be a boss, or a manager, but be a leader. Work side by side with them. Don't get caught up in titles. Show them that just because you may have a more senior title than they do, that you don't think you are any more important than they are.

Take time to have one on one meetings with the team. Just to tell them they are doing a great job, and you really appreciate them and the hard work they are doing. Try and have a team meeting once a week, with the whole team. Talk about the previous week and what they accomplished and the week ahead. Encourage people to bring ideas to the meeting, or just to talk about whatever is on their mind. Make it open forum.

Have an open door policy. Let them know if they ever want to talk about anything, that your door is always open, whether it's work related or not.

Your team should be your #1 priority. Everything else is secondary. Show them you care and appreciate everything they do.

Push to get additional staff hired. It's not acceptable to make your team work 60 hours a week for months at a time. Overtime should be a voluntary thing, especially when we are talking about that much of it, for that extended of a period. People should not have to work that much OT, unless they want to.

Read this book - http://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0058DRUV6

I have been reading Good to Great. It's a really interesting book about what common traits companies have that made the leap from being historically good, to some of the best businesses in the US. I really like this book because unlike Malcolm Gladwell books, it seems to be much less sensationalist and doesn't seem to be trying to prove a point. It just takes in all the facts and talks about them.