Reading path
Run the Company
Six books from what strategy actually is, through the operating habits that turn it into work, to what keeps a company compounding for decades.
The companion to Start a Company: this is the reading for once the thing exists and has to be run. It moves from deciding what you’re doing, to making people do it, to the habits that hold up over decades.
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
First, what strategy even is. Rumelt's kernel — an honest diagnosis, a guiding policy, coherent action — and his catalogue of the fluff that usually passes for it.
Blue Ocean Strategy
Then where to compete. Kim and Mauborgne's case for building a market nobody is fighting over instead of taking share in one everybody is.
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
Turning it into what people actually do this quarter. Grove's OKRs, via Doerr — objectives you can't fudge and key results you can't argue with.
High Output Management
The operating discipline underneath. Grove himself on meetings, leverage and what a manager's output really is.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't
What separates the companies that compound. Collins on Level 5 leaders, the hedgehog concept, and getting the right people on before the destination.
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
And the ones that last a century. The same researcher, eighteen companies each paired against a rival — the winners built clocks instead of telling time.