Suneera Madhani: Why Most Founders Fail—7 Things You Must Do to Succeed

Lean In, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, explores the professional, personal and societal hurdles holding women back from leadership positions in the workforce. The hurdles include discrimination, family-unfriendly policies, and a lack of help at home. To get more women into leadership positions and make true changes, Sandberg urges women to “lean in” to their careers, taking risks and being ambitious in their professional goals, while demanding more help at home. To do this, women must fight a lack of self-confidence and internalized gender stereotypes to forge fulfilling and rewarding personal and professional lives.

If you’re planning to start a business, The Unfair Advantage is the guidebook you need to achieve success. Entrepreneurs Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba tell you how to realize your entrepreneurial dreams by finding and using your unfair advantages, the qualities or conditions that give you an edge over competitors. Ali and Kubba explain that everyone has unfair advantages, and you need to use yours if you want to succeed in the ruthless domain of startups.

Drawing on over 20 years of experience building startups and coaching entrepreneurs, Ali and Kubba describe the mindset you must adopt and the steps you must take to achieve startup success—from identifying a viable business idea to building a winning team. In this guide, we’ll examine Ali and Kubba’s tips for finding and applying your unfair advantages. We’ll also compare the authors’ ideas to those of other business leaders—for instance, ideas from Brian Tracy in Goals! and Grant Cardone in The 10X Rule—and share additional steps you can take to achieve startup success.

Fast-growing companies often focus on scaling key aspects of their business, such as their sales, marketing budgets, and manufacturing process. But, according to management veteran Claire Hughes Johnson, they often forget to focus on their greatest resource: their people. In Scaling People, Hughes Johnson outlines the four key processes you should implement to successfully manage employees in a high-growth environment.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Hughes Johnson’s four key processes: process #1, defining your guiding principles and solidifying your operating system; process #2, building a promising hiring pipeline to hire the best candidates; process #3, turning these new hires into thriving teams; and process #4, continuously coaching employees through informal feedback and formal reviews. We’ll also supplement Hughes Johnson’s advice with more concrete strategies for employee management and consider alternative management approaches from other business experts.

Ben Horowitz was a public CEO through the dotcom bubble and burst. He learned a lot of hard lessons about how to build a company and get it to survive. Now co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he shares his advice to other founders and senior executives on getting through your company’s inevitable hard times.

The book covers a wide span of topics, including handling the psychology of a failing company, building a good place to work, scaling a company, and being a good CEO. It’s targeted to startup founders and CEOs, but there’s good advice here for anyone who wants to help build a better company.

In Scaling Up, Verne Harnish covers key strategies to grow your business from a small company into a firm employing hundreds or thousands of people. These facets include

• Articulating a clear vision for what you ultimately want your company to be—anchored by a core set of values
• Implementing the right long-term, multiyear strategy to bring that vision to life
• Putting the right team in place with smart hiring practices to bring new employees on board and regular training to keep your existing employees performing at a top level
• Guiding implementation by assigning core functions to individuals who will be accountable for them, establishing and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), maintaining a healthy cash flow, and maximizing your company’s labor productivity

Like most people, Paul Millerd was taught to place conventional, full-time work at the center of his life—but it made him miserable. Now, he’s a freelance blogger, consultant, career coach, and online course creator—and he’s much more satisfied with his life. In The Pathless Path, Millerd encapsulates his non-traditional approach to career success and lifelong happiness: deprioritizing work and pursuing a more meaningful, creative life through freelancing instead.

In this guide, you’ll learn about the historical trends that have led most Americans to prioritize work, the disadvantages of prioritizing work, and an alternative to this way of life—freelancing. You’ll also learn how and why Millerd shifted from the traditional workforce to the world of freelancing and his advice for making the transition yourself. In our commentary, we’ll talk about other perspectives on work and what makes life meaningful, and we’ll provide additional tips for those interested in freelancing.

You have a unique talent you were born to master, but knowing how to reach your creative and professional goals is not always easy. In The 5 AM Club, Robin Sharma explains how to discover your inner genius and maximize your abilities by adopting an early morning routine that activates your creative and productive potential. Your daily “Victory Hour” will enable you to narrow down your goals and reach them like a master. With this powerful tool you can become influential in your field and create a lasting impact on the world.

When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, the company was in decline. Once the wealthiest corporation in the world, it found itself lagging behind other tech giants like Apple and Google. Hit Refresh describes how Nadella brought new life to Microsoft by rediscovering its “soul”: He articulated the company’s mission, transformed the corporate culture, and formed strategic partnerships with Microsoft’s fiercest competitors.

In this guide, we discuss the principles and practices that helped Nadella “hit refresh” on Microsoft, which he connects to his experiences of growing up in India, immigrating to the US, and being a father to a child with special needs. We include actionable advice based on Nadella’s principles that can help you reinvigorate your own organization or career. We also explore his thoughts about the future and how we can—and must—ensure that technology isn’t just a means for economic growth but, above all, a force for good that is grounded on empathy.

Most people push themselves to work long, grueling hours, thinking this is what’s needed to achieve professional success. In The Buddha and the Badass, entrepreneur Vishen Lakhiani sets the record straight: “Hustling” won’t make you or your business successful. Instead, you need to be both spiritually enlightened (like a Buddha) and disruptive (like a badass). When you merge these qualities as a leader, you create an environment in which everyone learns, grows, gets along, and—most importantly—where work becomes play.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get in touch with your true identity to live an enlightened life according to your values. You’ll also learn how to disruptively transform your workplace from mundane and unexceptional to growth- and connection-oriented. We’ll supplement this information with outside perspectives on creating a successful company and culture, and with comparisons between Lakhiani’s self-improvement advice and that of other thinkers.