Want to know what books Peep Laja recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Peep Laja's favorite book recommendations of all time.
1
Peep LajaHiring interviews is a skill like any other. Poor skills lead to bad hiring decisions.
The book that gave the best process for hiring interviews:
Who - The A Method for Hiring.
Game changer. I recommend all your people in charge of conducting hiring interviews read it. (Source)
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3
At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone - perhaps ask a colleague a favour, negotiate with a contractor or get your spouse to put out the recycling. In the small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice - Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini - describe how, in today's information-overloaded world, it is now the smallest changes that lead to the biggest differences in results. more At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone - perhaps ask a colleague a favour, negotiate with a contractor or get your spouse to put out the recycling. In the small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice - Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini - describe how, in today's information-overloaded world, it is now the smallest changes that lead to the biggest differences in results. less See more recommendations for this book...
4
Written by a leading pricing researcher, Pricing Strategies makes this essential aspect of business accessible through a simple unified system for the setting and management of prices. Robert M. Schindler demystifies the math necessary for making effective pricing decisions. His intuitive approach to understanding basic pricing concepts presents mathematical techniques as simply more detailed specifications of these concepts. more Written by a leading pricing researcher, Pricing Strategies makes this essential aspect of business accessible through a simple unified system for the setting and management of prices. Robert M. Schindler demystifies the math necessary for making effective pricing decisions. His intuitive approach to understanding basic pricing concepts presents mathematical techniques as simply more detailed specifications of these concepts. less See more recommendations for this book...
5
Imagine if you could connect with your website visitors the moment they landed on your site. They understood exactly what kind of value your product or solution provided. And they were eager to join your email list or hit the buy button. What would that mean to your business? In Finding The Right Message, pro conversion rate optimizer and online copywriter Jen Havice walks you through how to ask the right questions of your customers to learn what they need to hear from you to take action on your website. In the book you’ll get a step by step guide that any small business owner or marketer can... more Imagine if you could connect with your website visitors the moment they landed on your site. They understood exactly what kind of value your product or solution provided. And they were eager to join your email list or hit the buy button. What would that mean to your business? In Finding The Right Message, pro conversion rate optimizer and online copywriter Jen Havice walks you through how to ask the right questions of your customers to learn what they need to hear from you to take action on your website. In the book you’ll get a step by step guide that any small business owner or marketer can easily start using.
You’ll learn:
Step-by-step process for review mining so that you can paint a picture of your customers with the words they use
Best practices for conducting interviews and surveys
How to analyze your voice of customer research findings and apply them to your copy
How to write a value proposition that speaks directly to the customer’s problem and how your product of solution will help fix it
What the differences between features and benefits really are and how that affects your website copy less See more recommendations for this book...
6
Named one of Steve Forbes' favorite books of 2015...
Are you ready to supercharge your career ... grow your business beyond your wildest dreams ... turn your life up to eleven?
Learn the secrets of success from "Mr. Relentless" himself. Capitalist evangelist Wayne Allyn Root—bestselling author, reality TV producer, serial entrepreneur, former vice presidential nominee, and business speaker on the international circuit—reveals the seven principles of relentless that will take you to a level you never imagined. more Named one of Steve Forbes' favorite books of 2015...
Are you ready to supercharge your career ... grow your business beyond your wildest dreams ... turn your life up to eleven?
Learn the secrets of success from "Mr. Relentless" himself. Capitalist evangelist Wayne Allyn Root—bestselling author, reality TV producer, serial entrepreneur, former vice presidential nominee, and business speaker on the international circuit—reveals the seven principles of relentless that will take you to a level you never imagined. less See more recommendations for this book...
7
In the vein of The Glass Castle, Breaking Night is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard.
Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, when her family finally unraveled, Murray found herself on the streets. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place... more In the vein of The Glass Castle, Breaking Night is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard.
Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, when her family finally unraveled, Murray found herself on the streets. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep.
Eventually, Murray decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. She squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York Times scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman's indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds. less See more recommendations for this book...
8
Anyone selling products or services online can benefit from this book. You will learn exactly how to make your website more successful and increase the amount of money you make from your website or e-commerce store. This also includes clear, actionable steps for you to increase retention and create loyal customers that will come back to spend more money. Plus, you can get examples of each case study listed in the book. In this book, there are three hundred different tactics to increase conversions, generate more leads, and maximize ROI. The key is to find the most profitable tasks and start... more Anyone selling products or services online can benefit from this book. You will learn exactly how to make your website more successful and increase the amount of money you make from your website or e-commerce store. This also includes clear, actionable steps for you to increase retention and create loyal customers that will come back to spend more money. Plus, you can get examples of each case study listed in the book. In this book, there are three hundred different tactics to increase conversions, generate more leads, and maximize ROI. The key is to find the most profitable tasks and start with those. The advice outlined should be organized into an annual marketing calendar. A marketing calendar is an organized schedule of when you need to create and promote the marketing throughout the year. This way, you can proactively set up the success of your e-commerce website. The book starts off with general advice about driving traffic to your website. Then, it details how to better understand your target customer. This is where we start to understand exactly to whom you should be marketing and why. Creating personas and your customer avatar will help you determine how and where you should be marketing your products. Next, I dive into specific areas of an e-commerce website. Each section has specific tips to maximize the effectiveness. I recommend trying as many of the tips as possible. Not all the advice will work exactly as I have outlined it. You need to test and experiment to determine the right approach for you. Finally, you will read specific suggestions on how to make more money from your e-commerce website. This money will come not only from new customers but also from repeat customers. This strategy is to help improve retention, resulting in a larger lifetime value. That includes suggestions for when your customers receive their products at their home or office. Apply the tactics listed in this book to any self-hosted shopping sarts or hosted ecommerce solution. The most popular hosted ecommerce software includes Shopify, BigCcmmerce, Volusion, NetSuite, Magento and Wordpress. less See more recommendations for this book...
9
Is your eCommerce business stagnant? Do you want to get to the next level and get there quickly? Would you like to be able to triple your leads in under six months? Are you unsure of what your next steps should be to boost sales? The truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter how much traffic you drive to your site if you can't convert it to sales. In this book, you will learn the five-step Marketing Optimization System to scale and grow your bottom line. This proven method is used to increase the percentage of visitors to your site that convert into customers. You will learn to gather... more Is your eCommerce business stagnant? Do you want to get to the next level and get there quickly? Would you like to be able to triple your leads in under six months? Are you unsure of what your next steps should be to boost sales? The truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter how much traffic you drive to your site if you can't convert it to sales. In this book, you will learn the five-step Marketing Optimization System to scale and grow your bottom line. This proven method is used to increase the percentage of visitors to your site that convert into customers. You will learn to gather intelligence through qualitative insight and quantitative data, and then execute successful split testing to increase sales and leads. Small Business Big Money Online will give you direct, actionable advice and techniques that you can simply apply to your own process, developing your own system along the way. less See more recommendations for this book...
10
Impossible Goals, Inevitable Successes
Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth.
From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth... more Impossible Goals, Inevitable Successes
Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth.
From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like the record-breaking Zenefits (which skyrocketed from $1 million to $100 million in two years), Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign--aka Adobe Document Services--(which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records. For instance, one of the authors shows how he grew his income from $67,000 to $720,000 in four years while maintaining a 20-30 hour work week and welcoming a new child--nine times.
This book shows you how to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster by answering three questions about growing revenue to tens times its size:
Why aren't you growing faster? What does it take to get to hypergrowth? How do you sustain growth? This powerful, effective book provides a template for you to kick off your biggest growth spurt yet. This template includes The 7 Ingredients Of Hypergrowth:
You're not ready to grow until you Nail a Niche.
Overnight success is a fairy tale. You're not going to be magically discovered. You need sustainable systems that Create Predictable Pipeline.
Growth exposes your weaknesses and it will cause more problems than it solves--until you Make Sales Scalable.
It's hard to build a big business out of small deals. Figure out how to Double Your Dealsize.
It'll take years longer than you want, but don't quit too soon. Make sure you can Do the Time.
Your people are renting, not owning their jobs. Develop a culture of initiative, not adequacy by Embracing Employee Ownership.
Employees, you are too accepting of "reality" and too eager to quit. You can Define Your Destiny to make a difference, for yourself and your company, no matter what you do or where you work. The authors take each ingredient and break it down into specific steps to guide you through implementation. From Impossible to Inevitable helps you take impossible goals and turn them into inevitable successes for your business and team. You will achieve success even bigger than you can imagine from where you're sitting today. less 
Jeremy BoudinetFrom Impossible to Inevitable is very tech-focused, but Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross are two of the most brilliant business minds on the planet, particularly when it comes to creating hyper-growth companies using innovative marketing strategies. There are transcendent insights in here for anyone working in marketing, technology, or startups. (Source)
Vincenzo RuggieroQuestion: What books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path?
Answer:
Rework, Getting real and Remote - The combo from Fried and DHH.
Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso
From Impossible To Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin
How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
Content Machine by Dan Norris
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and... (Source)
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11
The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Facebook was MySpace's sorry step-brother, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn't stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York City Yellow Cabs.
more The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Facebook was MySpace's sorry step-brother, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn't stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York City Yellow Cabs.
So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn't explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind these companies' extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking, and it's practitioners include not just today's hottest start-ups, but also companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who make up the community of GrowthHackers.com.
Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses customers attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more.
An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manger looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results. less 
Nir EyalIt used to be that designers and engineers were responsible for developing new products, data teams were responsible for number-crunching reports, and marketers were responsible for acquiring and monetizing as many customers as possible. But today’s companies can’t afford to be slowed down by organizational silos. Here, growth-hacking pioneers Ellis and Brown show how to break down those... (Source)
Eric RiesIn an increasingly erratic business landscape where new competition can emerge overnight, customers’ loyalties can shift unexpectedly, and markets are constantly being disrupted, finding growth solutions fast is crucial for survival. Hacking Growth provides a compelling answer to this urgent need for speed, offering companies a methodology for finding and optimizing new strategies to increase... (Source)
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12
Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin?
Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized?
Are you often busy but not productive?
Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas?
If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist.
The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic... more Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin?
Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized?
Are you often busy but not productive?
Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas?
If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist.
The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy – instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.
Essentialism is not one more thing – it’s a whole new way of doing everything. A must-read for any leader, manager, or individual who wants to learn who to do less, but better, in every area of their lives, Essentialism is a movement whose time has come. less Gilles BernhardEssentialism is a mindset. It is a combination of discipline, long term thinking, identifying goals and the pursuit of less. This is a book I will definitely read again and again, until mastered, because it resonated very much with me. It is also an easy to read book. (Source)
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13
New insights from the science of science
Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.
Samuel Arbesman shows us how knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and how this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives.
He takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change... more New insights from the science of science
Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.
Samuel Arbesman shows us how knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and how this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives.
He takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries. less 
Bertalan MeskóEvery book that helps understand better how old paradigms are replaced by new ones is a huge addition to our research on #digitalhealth.
That's why I liked The Half-Life of Facts. It describes how facts and knowledge change over time. A must-read in the age of fake news! https://t.co/R6Tq3AJIKu (Source)
Peep Laja@jlinowski @mcmillanstu this is the idea of half-life of things... as well as "science"... facts change
great book on the topic
https://t.co/ERJEwEI0Qv (Source)
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Don't have time to read Peep Laja's favorite books? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
