10 of the Best Books for Starting a Business

If you’re not quite sure what your path in life is, The Path Made Clear is a great place to start. Oprah guides readers through discovering what you’re most passionate about while simultaneously sharing stories from her own life. In the ten chapters, she pulls advice from other public figures, life lessons, and interviews to drive home each section. You’ll leave this book with a much clearer understanding of yourself and what you want out of life.

One of the main reasons a business fails is a lack of market need. Running Lean walks you through tools and case studies to vet your product before you run out of money and time. You’ll learn how to best identify your product and its market, develop a plan, and test your plan with experiments to make sure it’s the right one. Pick this up before clicking launch to make sure your plan is the one that works.

When it comes to business, I think we all have a hard time finding where happiness fits. Hsieh, though, argues happiness should be at the forefront of your entrepreneurial endeavors. Through stories of his path to Zappos, and his failures along the way, Hsieh makes a case to following what makes you happy. You can follow along with a four-part framework to best identify what would make you happiest, and a successful business is sure to follow.

If you’re starting a business, you probably think you have to be cutthroat. You have to crush your competition ruthlessly. But Blue Ocean Strategy argues otherwise. Based on studies into successful businesses, those who create “blue oceans,” or untapped market space, are the ones who last the longest. This book will give you the tools to identify your own blue ocean so your competition becomes irrelevant.

It’s no secret starting a new business is hard. Failure is inevitable, whether that be a lackluster launch day or a snafu with production down the line. Lin prepares you for failures like this so you don’t throw in the towel at the first sign of trouble. You’ll learn to laugh at some of these snags, have a better work-life balance, and be all around better able to bounce back after failure.

“Why do some people succeed and others fail?” asks Duckworth’s cover copy. Her answer? Grit. Pulling from her own journey through teaching, consulting, and even neuroscience, Duckworth demonstrates the value of sticking with it. Maybe you feel like a fraud, just starting out. Maybe you’ve hit a few roadblocks. Pick up Grit to convince yourself to keep going.

If you’ve got a team behind you, Radical Outcomes is a must-read. Age-old advice on how to train your staff, and how to get teams to work together, is just that: old. Stancampiano presents a new way of working and training to reduce things like organizational drag. Through examples from her own team at Oxygen, Stancampiano provides tools for business owners and bosses alike to strengthen their teams.

Do you want to change the world for the better with your business? Then Body and Soul is for you. Businesswoman Anita Roddick shares examples from her own life both personally and professionally to teach future business-owners how to maintain their personal values while still competing in the marketplace. You can care about doing good and also doing well at the same time.

Business ownership means communicating with many different types of people. And not just communicating but communicating well. Neustadt teaches you how to confidently connect with anyone, even strangers, about your business in a “no BS” way. She tells it to you straight, no sugarcoating. That way, you’ll be prepared with a true view of what you need to do to make your business thrive.

Running your own business comes with a lot of decisions to make. A lot. Do you venture off on your own or pull in business partners? Do you pick this logo or that? Through examples from other startups, both successful and failures, Wasserman illustrates the main mistakes that send a business crashing. Pick this up before you begin so you know what to look out for and how to avoid it.