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Finance books reviewed

“The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market” by Scott Anthony – a Book Review

A book about how to transform your innovation ideas into a working machine? Anytime! Especially when it comes from Harvard Business Review Press and it is packed with actionable advice and study cases.

“First Mile”s author (Scott Anthony) is not quite new to the innovation field. As a managing partner at Innosight (a small venture capital and consulting company from Singapore which generates 76,400 hits, quite  a lot for a discrete company), he has seen hundreds of such small companies starting and failing – or succeeding. And objective books by venture capitalists, written out of passion, are quite rare. So I braced myself for a potentially good read.

“The First Mile” is an entrepreneurship book mostly about creating, testing and starting the implementation of your business plan. It is a book oriented towards the first-time or maybe serial antrepreneurs, who want to do other mistakes than their predecessors. As a Harvard Business Review Press book, it has two main advantages:Read More »“The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market” by Scott Anthony – a Book Review

“Project Management for Profit” by Knight, Thomas and Angus – a Book Review

There are many books for project management on the market nowadays, as this turns into a profession. So why, would you ask, would somebody bother to write one more? The answer is simple – because none is perfect.

This is not to say that “Project Management for Profit” is the perfect book! However, it covers an important existing gap in the market, namely the “get to the practical basics in PM”. “Project Management for Profit” talks about the practical aspects of managing a project under tight deadlines, with multiple stakeholders and quite a few problems. In other words, the book goes for project management as it happens in reality, not in the theory.Read More »“Project Management for Profit” by Knight, Thomas and Angus – a Book Review

“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin – a Book Review

Strategy books are so many this year, that you could literally by a dozen by the 10 dollar bill from Amazon. I would go so far as even to say that there are too many. So many strategy tomes are written, that the authors are no longer named “authors”, but “thinkers”, as a new job description… And classified accordingly. (top 50 thinkers, year by year).
“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” (to give the book’s complete name) is actually a very different book in this respect. First of all, “Playing to Win” is written from a practitioner’s perspective. Both authors (A.G. Lafley – by the way, you should buy the book at least for the nice haircut of this gentleman  – and Roger Martin) have created this strategic decision making system during their working life. Actually the system described here was literally applied and developed within Procter & gamble, a fairly successful company overall and a very successful one if e take out the tech sector in the last decade :).

Secondly, the book is written as a Harvard Business Review mega study case. Read More »“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin – a Book Review

Light Financial Books – “A Beginner’s Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money the Smart and Easy Way” – A Book Review

“A Beginner’s Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money the Smart and Easy Way” seems like a long title for a book that pretends to be simple and quick to understand. Yet, the title of this investment book might just reflect the reality. Have a look at the financial investments books that are on the market – most of them are either too complicated (take for example Tirole’s “Theory of Corporate Finance“, where lots of financial maths are involved), either too vague (for example Fisher’s “The Only Three Questions You Need to Ask“). Starting from this point, the authors of “Beginner’s Guide to Investing” (Alex Frey and Ivy Bites) thought to create an accessible investing guide, without many frills and with essential data within.Read More »Light Financial Books – “A Beginner’s Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money the Smart and Easy Way” – A Book Review