Excellent entrepreneurial books/sites

An article of mine in the current Publishers Weekly recommends managerial books for bookstore managers. The list complements a talk I gave at the recent American Booksellers Association convention, and is meant to help any manager expand his or her entrepreneurial chops. By the way, the piece complements another article on developing managerial skills which I wrote a few years back for PW. Here's a few of my favorite websites that expand on the recommended titles.

The best sites are those that go provide material beyond the pages of the books. David Allen’s site, for example, shares his excellent newsletter, provides early access to his next book, Ready for Anything,and a wealth of other useful stuff about getting things done. Jim Collins supplements the wisdom of Built To Last and Good To Great with an expansive site that reveals his academic past. This sprightly site provides deep background to Collins ideas—packed with a decade’s worth of articles and other writings, pieces about him, discussion guides to the ideas, and even direct access to the research itself: you need look no further for a great start on his key ideas. My one slight gripe is that he doesn’t update the site with new material (like the recent cover story in Fortune on the ten greatest CEOs of all time.) Some of the recommended books have decent websites that give a sense of the book itself but no more—such as those for A Stake in the Outcome, a great book that is well-served to the extent that you can download a few generous excerpts. But I have yet to find a great online resource on the topic of Open Book Management.

By the way, I would like to cite several books that I overlooked in the piece: Open Book Management by John Case, the writer who really owns the phrase and the conceptual framing of this practice. Also, I am very fond of Guerilla Publicity’s savvy methods for leveraging your resources to generate sales and buzz. And finally, for bootstrappers: try this essay I wrote, which sells on Amazon.