The book that taught me that economics and finance has played a great part in our world wars. And that history taught by our CBSE books is overly simplistic at best and just wrong at worst.
Taught me the difference between how rich people treat their money and how poor people spend it. It has shaped my life immensely and given me a few sound rules of how to manage money.
This book reminded me that reading great literature is still a labor of love and requires great effort. It solidified my dislike for Chetan Bhagat class of books. It also proved to me that great literature is not necessarily written in English. With its multiple points of view of narration, is probably the best way to view the world.
The first book that showed me what India was really like before I was born. Dark, depressing, painful, this story really created beauty out of abject hopelessness and the travesty of life. We are lucky to finally have gotten out of the 70s and 80s.
The book that conclusively taught me, that men who increasingly control the modern world, are those who understand money and allocate capital. It also taught me the one thing I wish they had taught us in B-Schools, how the bond market control the fortunes of countries and how decisions made almost a hundred years back can affect us today.
This crack of a book taught me that everything is connected. It’s just that the authors decided to project it through economics. Which makes sense, since macro and micro development/phenomena may be expressed as a function of finance or culture or both.
Opened my eyes to the science of consumption in a retail setting. It gave me great insight into what makes us buy. Why was it revolutionary? Because this science was created by enterprising retailers rather than theoretical scientists. And now we have the opportunity to apply most of this in India.
Taught me finance, Period. I wasted my money on an MBA. If you don’t understand balance sheets, P&L statements and cash flows for you startup, this is what you must read. It taught me how accounting is more of an art and hence requires a great understanding of the rules, to be able to bend them. Essential read for all aspiring entrepreneurs.
This guy tells a story. And he tells it well. Read this book and it will give you great guidelines into how to make a business that is not dependant on you, the founder/s, but can run as an entity on its own. Also gives you great tips on how to made you business saleable. Will dedicate a post to this one for sure.
Every time I go through a tough trying time, I end up reading the Guru’s book, Seth Godin. Most of us will be able to finish it off in a couple of hours. But what it really does is that it tries to explain the one obstacle most high performance professionals/entrepreneurs/businessmen/executives face. The Dip. When things are going so bad, even when you are trying real hard, this is the book that explain why.
Conclusively proves why probability, mean, medians etc and all that math stuff which I could never get, is important in life... simply to understand that you can’t base financial decisions on them or any projection model. It states that one can never decisively predict the future in detail by working with tools and knowledge of the past. A thick dense read. But fantastic stuff. And NNT isn’t just writing this as a theory. He runs a company which bets on the black swan and bets against all the financial mathematical models crammed with algorithms.
Though the book might been seen by most as this 1000+page mammoth effort for readers, for me it started as just another book, I had to prove, that I could read. I never intended on liking it. But now I understand why it is possibly the greatest novel ever written. Leo Tolstoy explains Tsarist Russia and its aristocrats, with Russia’s multitude of battles with Napoleon’s France, as the setting. But what captures one’s imagination is the insight he offers into people during those testing times of war and how they were so different from us... and yet so alike. Masterpiece.
The Book that started it all for me, which led to my fascination with amazing companies. Though a little dated, it’s a must read for any senior executive and entrepreneur who wants to create a company not just for its bottom line, but to really make a difference. Personally I feel that’s why anyone should run a company
Startup Yapper 