Best Books To Read As An Entrepreneur – What are the best books to read if you want to be an entrepreneur? Oxford Saïd Business School’s Thomas Hellmann, DP World Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, shares his top five books—and explains what entrepreneurs can learn from them.
There are two questions. One of them is, can entrepreneurs learn? Other than that, where do they learn more? Some people argue that entrepreneurship is something you are born with, that entrepreneurship is born and cannot be taught. I think this is fundamentally wrong.
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We have a lot of evidence that entrepreneurship is a learned behavior. We know this from several studies, which show that having an entrepreneurial parent gives you the ability to become an entrepreneur yourself. We have seen a huge increase in institutions that help people hone their entrepreneurial skills in universities as well as in the private sector – such as the accelerator programs that are all the rage right now.
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Then, there are various other proofs. Venture capitalists prefer entrepreneurs who have done it before: serial entrepreneurs. And the entrepreneurs themselves say that they are better. So clearly there is a lot of learning to be done.
“Instead of starting their own entrepreneurship, I want people to have a big picture of why we’re doing this and why entrepreneurship is important to the world.”
The question then, can academic study or, more broadly, scholarship be added? I will say yes and no. It is, in a sense, a job where many skills are acquired through experience, just like you can’t be a good tennis player if you don’t play tennis. But at the same time, in the learning process, there is a lot of waste, wasted time, and wasted effort that can be prevented by having the right framework and concepts.
Here people interested in entrepreneurship can learn a lot from books, courses and personal conversations with mentors – all who try to direct them in the most promising direction.
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Tell me about the book on entrepreneurship that you chose. Is there a story you thought about this particular choice?
Entrepreneurship is difficult to define and is a diverse field of interest, both in terms of practice and academic work. So what I try to do with my book selection is to intentionally bring in books by very different authors, very different audiences, and very different approaches. Not everyone will consider every book about entrepreneurship, and different people will have different views on what ‘entrepreneurship’ is and what it is not, but the purpose of this book selection is to generate an extraordinary range of thought. there are and benefits we can get from different types of inspiration.
Let’s find out more when reading the book, the first one is clearly not about entrepreneurship. called
This is perhaps the most obvious choice of the five, but it is a book I often recommend to students who come to me with genuine curiosity. It may be more about innovation than entrepreneurship itself. (Here we already have the question of whether entrepreneurs are innovators. Yes, many, but not all. Are all entrepreneurs innovators? Absolutely not!)
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It is about the origin of many entrepreneurial activities, which is human curiosity. It is an amazing book that covers several thousand years of human history.
It looks at human history through the lens of innovation and how many people try to identify new ideas and concepts – ideas and concepts that we take for granted. It is a process of struggling and going down the wrong path and having various surprises along the way which is very important for the entrepreneurial process.
Instead of starting entrepreneurship myself, I want people to start there and get the big picture of why we do this and why entrepreneurship is important to the world.
I will give two or three examples from books and chapters that are particularly interesting. The part of the book that I really like is called “Time” and describes the story of how humans discovered the concept of time and began to measure time. And it’s very vague—and it’s clearly not about entrepreneurship—but it’s very important because it’s about revealing ambiguity and human difficulty in making sense of something. But if you have, it becomes very clear.
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Now, for us, a watch is the easiest thing in the world. We teach five-year-old children how to read – but for thousands of years people do not have clocks and do not have this sense. There are many aspects that require people to understand and then measure time. It is an eye opener to the types of challenges that we, as humans, can face and overcome. It’s amazing how we can measure time these days.
My favorite part of the book is the story of the explorers. It’s a lot of fun, but the book does an amazing job of explaining how difficult these great discoveries are. My favorite part is about Christopher Columbus. This is truly an entrepreneurial story. This is an entrepreneur who spends a lot of time raising money to do exploration. He was looking for a western route to India. The idea of discovering a new continent did not occur to anyone during the entire process until he discovered the land and actually mistook it for India.
This is a good analogy of the entrepreneurial process. First, you have to put in a lot of effort to get something. Then when you start, something else happens and it can be very different from what you want.
So, some things really opened my mind about innovation and this process of going from the unknown and the unknown to what we know and barely know.
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So with your students, do you tell them that instead of looking at a spreadsheet, you’re all going to step back and think about the scope of the story and think of ideas to open their minds? Is this part of your job?
Yes, we do some. We always teach and try to warn about most of the things we don’t know. In fact, sometimes we give them practical tools to understand what they don’t know and generate listening and observation skills that will reveal what they don’t say.
And then when they’re studying the entrepreneurial process, it’s all about finding gaps. It’s all about looking for something that doesn’t exist.
Let me give you a practical example. There is a group of students who are thinking of starting some kind of medical device company. Instead of saying, ‘Here’s a solution to a problem we don’t understand the problem and we’re not sure if our solution works’ – which is a bad way to do business – they start by being very careful about testing. know what the basic practice is.
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He spent some time as a fly on the wall in the operating room and watched surgeons perform operations for days. He found that some of the surgeon’s movements took a lot of time, delayed the operation, and were probably unnecessary. The surgeon continues to face the patient, but then has to look at the image that is elsewhere in the operating room.
Then they come up with a solution because they realize a problem that no one else understands. Surgeons who have been performing this procedure for years are unaware of the problem. He realized that by projecting the image the surgeon saw onto the patient’s body, he could improve the efficiency of the operation.
This is an example where no one knows the problem actually exists. You may create a new device, but what today’s surgeons need is very different.
(2011) by Walter Isaacson. I have to admit that I was never interested in Steve Jobs, but I started reading this book and now I am. It is completely attractive.
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I have to say I love this book. I have very ambivalent feelings about Steve Jobs, but this book is interesting for anyone. Steve Jobs has become a cult figure and many things have been attributed to him – good and bad – that may not apply. Walter Isaacson really makes an honest effort to get to the truth, but at the same time brings out all the interesting parts of life.
It focuses on why Steve Jobs is an unusual character, but also to what extent he represents the spirit of Silicon Valley and modern entrepreneurship. I think that Steve Jobs is, for all his faults, almost a symbol – and certainly a role model – for all young generations who want to be entrepreneurs.
What’s interesting about Steve Jobs is that there was a lot of opposition
