Top Shelf Reading Picks:

I almost didn’t make it through the first few chapters of The Girls’ Guide to Building a Million-Dollar Business by Susan Wilson Solovic because I have no tolerance for books that waste valuable space telling women that it’s OK to have a million-dollar business. Of course it’s OK to have a million-dollar business. And if that’s what you’re worried about, then maybe you shouldn’t be launching a business in the first place.

Sidebar: When I was reading the beginning of the book, I kept having flashbacks to a golf seminar for women I sat through (barely sat through, actually). They spent the whole time telling women that it’s OK to be competitive on the golf course. You think? (Insert sarcasm here.) I walked out because it was clear I wasn’t going to get help with my chipping. While a few of my colleagues followed me out the door, the rest of the women were laughing and nodding knowingly. Maybe it was a generational thing?

Anyhow, if you can stomach the opening, the book does deliver some good stuff. Some of it is female-centric, but good. Here are some points I liked:

• p. 39. Solovic mentions how being an entrepreneur can alter your relationships, meaning that you won’t have time to socialize or that others might not appreciate the new you. I admit, I go through phases such as now, where I only want to talk to people about social media. Sometimes I have to remind myself that no one else cares about this stuff as much as I do.
• p. 41. Create a peer network. This is what I liked. She mentions a problem (altered relationships) and provides a solution. Personally, peer networks focused around a targeted issue work better for me than any random networking or mentor situation.
• p. 75. Hire the best candidate, not the best job seeker. That’s a great point.
• p. 83. Take emotions out of the workplace. She has a good discussion about how loyalty to original employees, etc. can harm your business plan, especially if they are no longer of value.
• p. 108-109. I liked the sections on media pitches and the importance of applying for awards (there’s some good basic advice here).
• p. 129-131. She offer tips about being strategic with banks and credit lines.
• p. 140. An interesting discussion about gender bias by venture capital firms.

Top Shelf Bottom Line: If you can get past the early fluff, it’s a good guide to read either before starting a business or when you need to take your business to the next step. This is why I wish she would have just stuck to the business advice.Besides, if you need the pep talk, there are other books that accomplish this, like the one below.

Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success by Dr. Susan L. Reid. I preface this review with the fact that “motivational” and “new age-y” books are so not my style. But once in a while we all have to step out of our comfort zone. I have to admit, I did find some interesting ideas in here, although would’ve liked more discussion of samurais (somehow they’re much more appealing than the geisha discussion in Rules for Renegades). I thought the discussion of Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings (a book that she claims Japanese businessmen used for centuries) was interesting. That book has nine rules:

• Do not think dishonestly.
• The Way (path) is in training.
• Become acquainted with every art.
• Know the Ways of all professions.
• Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
• Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.
• Perceive those things that cannot be seen.
• Pay attention even to trifles.
• Do nothing that is of no use.

While Reid gives an overview of each rule, I would’ve been interested to learn even more. I also liked the section on working with, not against, your multiple streams of passion; left and right brain thinking; and the Planets and Moon test (a test that can help make sense of your various passions. For more on that, you should also check out Marci Alboher’s One Person/Multiple Careers).

Another interesting section talked about how many times women would come to her because they have problems with their businesses. She would listen to their stories and show them that their issues were “resistance” and not always an indicator to throw in the towel (i.e. shades of Seth Godin’s The Dip).

Top Shelf Bottom Line: It’s an interesting motivational book. Not my norm, but while I would’ve wanted more stuff about samurais and Japanese business philosophy, it still had some interesting takes on becoming an entrepreneur.

If it hadn’t been written by Seth Godin, I probably never would have picked up The Dip because I thought it was one of those single concept books that can be explained in one sentence, e.g., The Secret, The World is Flat and The Long Tail. The latter two actually benefit from some good examples, although they did start to feel redundant after a bit. As for The Secret, my newer readers can click here to read what I really thought about that book.

Anyhow, I gave it a go, because I knew Godin would be entertaining. Besides, it was extremely short,  more of an essay than a book. On top of that, it covered a topic I could totally relate to–when should an entrepreneur quit, and when does one continue to push through a dip? With any entrepreneurial endeavor (and Godin argues almost any venture), after the initial launch, there’s always a plateau or down period where quitting seems the easier alternative. The Dip explores when to quit and when to push on.

Godin starts out by identifying why it’s so important to be number one in any business/enterprise. That’s an easy concept, especially when he uses Jack Welch’s six sigma as an example (quit any business in which GE was not one or two. Although I’m curious: Has any other company adopted that approach with equal success?).

Next, Godin asks you to identify whether your company is facing a dip (meaning, you will come out ahead after slogging through it), a cul-de-sac (i.e., a dead end) or a cliff (where you have slow and steady growth and then an abrupt drop-off). He uses smoking as an example of the “cliff,” but I’m thinking 8-track tapes, Beta video recorders, record stores, Blockbuster and even Netflix.

The focus of the book then shifts to quitting. When to quit and why you should be a quitter. His point is that the phrase “winners never quit” is a bogus statement because winners quit a lot of things or they wouldn’t be winners. He uses the example of athletes who quit playing the sports they weren’t good at to focus on the one they are the best at. Phew. I feel soooo much better about quitting my college tennis team, leaving a law practice after only three years and even hanging up my soccer cleats last winter (my knees feel so much better after the last one). The trick is not to quit everything but to quit the things that aren’t beneficial to moving you toward where you really want to be, so that you can focus on the activities that are beneficial. Maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a job, maybe it’s a marketing campaign.

So, how do you know when to quit? I liked Godin’s simple test. You need to ask yourself, am I moving forward? Am I standing still? Or am I falling backward? If it’s the latter two, you’re never going to get where you want to go–so quit. But before you quit, you also need to determine whether you are simply panicking. How do you avoid making a decision in a panic situation? He recommends planning in advance what factors should lead to your quitting. A fortune 500 company comes out with the same product? You get an offer you can’t refuse? You’re so miserable you can’t get up every day? The bank is about to foreclose on your house?

He also points out some items that get in the way of intelligent quitting: childhood admonitions about never quitting, pride and money spent (i.e., my law school tuition). But, on an inspirational note, I liked his statement, “If it’s worth doing, there’s probably a dip.” My company is coming out of a dip right now, so I can honestly say it really was worth all the effort and the sleepless nights.

Top Shelf Bottom Line: While the first few chapters seemed a bit redundant, he does get into a few interesting examples. Overall, I liked the book because it helped make sense of some “quitting” I’ve done and got me to consider which factors will signal to me “it’s quitting time” in the future. I’ve also found myself referencing it to friends in the past two days. So maybe its significance is a bit more than one would think. In sum, this is a good book for any entrepreneur facing a dip to help focus on the right things and to look at the negatives in a positive light. However, don’t be expecting advice on how to get you out of your dip, as this is more of a macro view about how to manage dips in your business plan (although I do see how one could even apply this to personal relationships).

It’s only January, and I can’t believe I’ve found my favorite book of the year already: Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands by David Vinjamuri (available in March 2008). Of course I’m biased, because branding is a huge focus for me at the moment. But it fits in with my all-time favorites because, at least two or three times mid-chapter, I put my advance copy down and ran to the computer to make changes to the draft of my new website (More on that later.)

It also makes my favorites list (see the whole list on www.womensdish.com) because it reads like a collection of Vanity Fair articles–entertaining portraits of individuals and how they built their companies. The six individuals are:

John Peterman (The J. Peterman Co.)
Craig Newmark (Craigslist)
Gary Erickson (Clif Bar and Co.)
Myrian Zaoui and Eric Malka (The Art of Shaving)
Gert Boyle (Columbia Sportswear)
Julie Aigner-Clark (The Baby Einstein Co.)
Roxanne Quimby (Burt’s Bees)

While I learned a bit from all of them, I have to be honest. The only profile I found lacking was the one on The Art of Shaving. Perhaps that’s because it was the only brand with which I was unfamiliar. Or maybe it’s because its market/retail aspect has no relationship to my business. I don’t know, but some of the highlights/insights from the rest include:

Craig Newmark/Julie Aigner-Clark. Not everyone is meant to be a CEO. Craig likes resolving the disputes on Craigslist (The idea of someone getting a personal admonition from Craig for misuse of the service just made me laugh, thinking of the person’s reaction) . Julie is back being a teacher after selling her company to Disney. While they both are still working when they don’t have to, they are pretty much back to their normal lives, with minimal interest in the material things in life. Note to Craig, though: It sounds like you have a very nice girlfriend, and you really should take her on a vacation. Craig and Julie both started a business to solve problems plaguing them and their friends. This is something that recurs in almost all the profiles and is a good question for any entrepreneur to answer: Is your widget/service solving someone’s problem?

John Peterman. His story was interesting because he had to handle a unique issue in which his exclusive brand suffered because it became less exclusive, thanks to Jerry Seinfeld. Yet, he was willing and had the drive to start over from scratch.

Gert Boyle. The beginnings of Columbia Sportswear could be traced back to creating a product to meet a client’s needs. Columbia also was asked by a customer early on to design a fishing vest, and that item made the business boom. I also found it interesting to hear the background behind the famous commercials showing Boyle putting her son through the car wash to test her gear. One could quite imagine that Gert might have thought about doing it for real.

Roxanne Quimby. While her honey and candles did great, it wasn’t until she dabbled in lip balm that the business exploded. She went with it. Like Boyle, she was open to what her customers were telling her and willing to change direction.

Gary Erickson. His chapter demonstrated how, sometimes, listening to your gut and your employees might help you in the long run because bigger doesn’t always mean better. At one point, he truly thought the next step was to sell out to a big company. But he decided to try it on his own and, buoyed by the launch of the Luna Bar, was able to grow his market share despite not having a fortune 100 behind the company.

Vinjamuri sums up the lessons to be learned as follows:

Rule No. 1 – Do sweat the small stuff.
Rule No. 2 – Pick a fight.
Rule No. 3 – Be your own customer.
Rule No. 4 – Be unnaturally persistent.
Rule No. 5 – Build a myth.
Rule No. 6 – Be faithful.

I wholeheartedly agreed with his list and felt I could check off four of the six items. But it was Rules No. 2 and No. 5 that made me drop the book and hit the computer. I realized in our “aboutâ€? section I had some bland “blah blah blahâ€? language describing the founding of the Downtown Women’s Club (It’s still up there.  The new site is coming later this month). Yet when I spoke to potential customers or journalists about the club, I told a completely different story about how existing women’s business groups at that time turned younger women away and even today don’t use technology to make networking convenient for my busy schedule–and those were the two primary reasons I founded my company. I also usually mention some of the more personal challenges I’ve had (the good, the bad and the funny) to demonstrate why I am my own best customer. So, thanks to Accidental Branding, in the new version of our website, I’ll be telling it like it was.

Will I build an extraordinary brand like the folks listed above? Who knows. But, it may be time to reread Made to Stick (another all-time favorite) to ensure I’m doing all that I can.

The Top Shelf Bottom Line: Must read for any entrepreneur trying to build his or her brand. Enough said.

*Addendum. After hearing me rave, a friend gave me a similar book called Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell by Nancy F. Koehn. It’s similar in that it follows a handful of entrepreneurs who built extraordinary brands. As a Harvard Business School Press publication, it’s written more like a textbook than a collection of magazine articles. That has its advantages, as it contains more hard data. But I used a 4-Hour Workweek recommendation and only read the chapters that interested me–Estee Lauder and Starbucks–and bits of the other chapters that were interesting historically, as well as the wrap-up at the end. Since it was written pre-Web 2.0 and focused more on people selling products, it had more historical interest than utility for my business.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss topped the charts of business books in 2007. When I finally got my copy from the library, I didn’t quite know what to expect. In fact, I thought it would be more theoretical, with fewer concrete “how to’s.” And while there were a few things I liked, I was surprisingly lukewarm about a book I thought would be a “must read.” (Perhaps this suffered a bit from my falling in love with Accidental Branding, which I read just before 4-Hour Workweek and will review next as my first “must read” in 2008.)

What I liked: The book repeats in various ways over and over that you need to redefine your ideas about success. Just because others may judge your life (as well as their own) based on how much money you make, which car you drive, where you have your vacation home and the size of your McMansion, McBoobs or McWardrobe doesn’t mean that you have to. In fact, I loved the part where he says that what prompted him to take charge of his life was that he was horrified by the vision of himself turning into a “fat man in a red BMW convertible” (I’ll never be able to pass another one of those guys again without laughing my head off.) However, if that’s why you need to read this book, i.e., for a priorities realignment–you might want to check out either The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubormirsky or Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss. Both are on order for me at my local library.

I skimmed over the sections on getting over your fear of adjusting your lifestyle, as I’ve already done this. I run a company while my son is in school and in bed. So they could be helpful to budding entrepreneurs. I did like Chapter 2, which discusses “10 Rules That Change The Rules,” as it was thought-provoking:

1. Retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance;
2. Interest and energy are cyclical;
3. Less is not laziness;
4. The timing is never right;
5. Ask for forgiveness, not permission;
6. Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses;
7. Things in excess become their opposite;
8. Money alone is not the solution;
9. Relative income is more important than absolute income; and
10. Distress is bad, eustress is good.

I also found his section on eliminating information interesting. He gives suggestions, such as asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” and practicing the art of nonfinishing. This used to be a tough concept for me, until I just couldn’t get past the beginning of Cold Mountain. This was literally the first book that everyone else liked that I didn’t, and it marked the first time I didn’t finish a book I had started. This was actually a very “freeing” moment in my life and even today helps me review business books. I don’t read chapters that don’t pertain to my immediate needs.

The outsourcing section was also quite good because Ferriss gave clear details on how to do it. I’m actually going to look into the phone services he mentions. I already outsource my website to India (which only works due to the incredible project manager over there–when he wasn’t on the project for a while, it was a total disaster). I may see about using India for further isolated research/database work.

I liked his challenge to prioritize your work (and eliminate the rest) by shortening your hours. If you only have four hours to work today, what would you do? Not that I needed help here. Ask any working parent. So, for those naysayers who think a working parent (mom or dad) can’t get it all done in less time, this book is a good one to show your boss/investors/employees, etc.

All in all, there was a lot of good information in here. Especially the fact that, like Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist, it goes against almost every boomer-led company philosophy based on the value of face time and defining yourself through your career. Not that I don’t like boomers. I just love when people shake up the establishment (and, yes, I’m celebrating the results in Iowa).

But, back to the topic at hand:

There were two big detractors in the book. First, it reminded me of Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone. It had a lot of good information, but the whole time I was thinking, “Only Keith could pull all this off.” That’s sort of my feeling with Ferriss’ book. Only Tim Ferriss could do this because of his personality, energy, lack of dependants, etc. Second, I did find some useful tidbits, but I’m an entrepreneur who can dictate my own schedule and, in some sense, income. I also run a company that is designed to be more and more automated every day. I’m not sure how this would work for an employee (He does devote a lot of pages to that issue–but it’s under the premise that you can persuade your employer to accept this). Or, if you’re someone who bills by the hour, beyond the outsourcing chapters, I’m not sure what else you can do except get a new career.

The Top Shelf Bottom Line: 4-Hour Workweek is an interesting footnote in business, as it documents a change in our society and our attitudes about work and culture (which I would argue is for the better). There are definitely some good takeaways for entrepreneurs who need ideas on how to further automate their businesses or for anyone needing to realign his or her priorities. But it didn’t make me put down the book and rush over and redo my business plan (which generally is a factor in making my “Must Read” list). However, that may be because I have already implemented much of what he says. So I would love to hear your input on this one since, based on sales, everyone must have read it (and no doubt helped Tim make it to a one-hour workweek).

**Sidenote: I had to laugh the other day as I caught a episode of The Jetsons and George’s job is literally to push a button a couple of times a day. Tim Ferriss would be so proud.

We were honored to be recognized on the blog Living Life Abundantly as a Top 50 blog for 2007. Oprah–watch out. Maybe we’ll be able to help contribute to making some overlooked business books into bestsellers.

Keep the comments and book suggestions coming.