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Bill Gates Recommends Business Owners Read these

We have talked about the fact that learning something new and continuously acquiring new knowledge is the hallmark of great business leaders and entrepreneurs.

Bill Gates is one of them. Not only does he read one book a week, he also writes about them in his blog Gatesnotes.com

Inc. magazine small business writer, Jeremy Goldman, went through Bill Gates postings and came up with a list that he believes can inspire small business owners and entrepreneurs to be better at what they do. And be a better person.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Nature vs Nurture is at the heart of this book, as it applies to intelligence. It challenges the idea that qualities we are born with cannot be change. Intelligence, Carol Dweck says, can grow and evolve, and the belief in static intelligence can be debilitating. She challenges the idea that you have to be born and have special circumstances in order to be successful.

Gates says that the book made him look at different areas of his life to see if he is looking at it through a fixed mind-set lens. Once you know it, you can change it and be more productive.

Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

The book talks about modern innovations and how they came into being. It talks about incremental development and provides a narrative to how the greatest innovations happen. It’s not a matter of a sudden strike of genius. Innovation takes time, and Bill Gates admits that Microsoft wasn’t a result of “a momentous flash of insight”. It’s a book that brings innovation down to earth and examines what it takes for innovation to flourish.

Business Adventures by John Brooks

This book is recommended not only by Bill Gates but also by Warren Buffett. Case studies of many big companies like G.E, Ford and Xerox, their successes and their failures. The book provides a great view of the human factor and whether there were the right people in the right positions. In that way it’s a book about human nature.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

On top of being a very readable book, it delves into Steve Jobs personality without masking much. His brilliance and his faults. His humanity and dis-humanity. His mind and his work. It follows the development of the iconic products, the iPod, iPad, and iPhone. A great lesson in design and product development.

The Art of Being Unreasonable by Eli Broad

The man who recently opened a museum in Los Angeles and finally found a befitting place to hang his extensive art collection, is known for his “reality distortion field”. He somehow manages to convince people to do the impossible. The book pushed the reader to avoid limits and reject reason by doing really big things and taking big risks. Broad advocates not being second to anything, and demanding more from yourself and the people around


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