Rating: 8.1/10. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson Book about the book publishing industry, primarily the USA and the UK. Publishers act as middlemen: they purchase content from agents, who represent the business interests of authors; they add value to the process in several ways: by content…
Category: Business / Finance
The Business of Being an Artist by Daniel Grant
Rating: 7.2/10. Book about the business side of art. Ideally, your art would be displayed in a gallery where people will buy it, but galleries themselves face intense economic pressures and they need to sell most of their art in order to break even. Therefore, most artists need to do a lot of thinking like…
Learning Google AdWords and Google Analytics by Benjamin Mangold
Rating: 8.3/10. Textbook about the two tools in the Google marketing stack: Google AdWords and Google Analytics, with about half of the book devoted to each. The four types of marketing are: search, display, social and content. Despite popular belief, online ads are a huge market, making most of Google’s revenue, but requires some expertise…
Chip War by Chris Miller
Rating: 8.2/10. Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller Book about the history of computer chips and international geopolitics that has become entangled with the processes of manufacturing them. The COVID pandemic has highlighted the fragility of the computer chip supply chain: chips require a complex network of hundreds…
Restaurant Success by the Numbers by Roger Fields
Rating: 8.7/10. Restaurant Success by the Numbers: A Money-Guy’s Guide to Opening the Next New Hot Spot by Roger Fields Book about the restaurant industry written by an accountant who ran several restaurants in New York. There’s a common myth that 80-90% of restaurants fail within the first year. In reality, restaurants have one of…
Rockonomics by Alan B. Krueger
Rating: 8.8/10. Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger Book by an economist describing the financial realities of the music industry. Relative to how much value it provides to our lives, music is extremely cheap. The majority of Americans listen to music…
Catching Hell by Allen Ricca with Joe Muto
Rating: 8.2/10. Catching Hell: The Insider Story of Seafood from Ocean to Plate by Allen Ricca with Joe Muto Book by a businessman in the seafood distribution business. His business essentially buys seafood from producers and sells it to restaurants, handling warehouse and delivery operations. The author took over the business from his father: after…
Hope is Not a Strategy by Rick Page
Rating: 7.9/10. Hope Is Not a Strategy: The 6 Keys to Winning the Complex Sale by Rick Page Guide to how to make complex sales to businesses, this is challenging because of multiple stakeholders involved on the client side, and the complex decision making process. The salesperson needs to have good understanding of the client’s…
They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan
Rating: 7.8/10. They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer by Marcus Sheridan. Guide of how to do content marketing for your business. The author worked in a pool business selling and installing swimming pools for homeowners, and describes how content marketing improved his sales and saved…
Essentials of Supply Chain Management by Michael Hugos
Rating: 7.2/10. An overview of things to consider when designing and managing a supply chain. A supply chain consists of many players: factories make the product, distributors take bulk from factories and deliver packages of related goods to retailers, who sell small quantities to the public. Each player needs to think about production, holding inventory,…
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Rating: 7.5/10. Classic book about marketing, published in 1980. Positioning is the act of communicating to your user what your product is. Consumers are constantly bombarded with advertisements and are overloaded with information, so they cannot absorb your message unless it is very simple (no need for poetic wording in the slogan). Always position your…
Onward by Howard Schultz
Rating: 7.3/10. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz Memoir by the CEO of Starbucks about how he turned the company around during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. In 2007, there were lots of small things that indicated the company was losing its competitive edge: they prioritized opening…