The MBA World Trophy has put together our selection of the 12 great business books for startups. From the Lean Startup to the latest Malcom Gladwell book, there is plenty here to keep the startup person in your life busy reading this Christmas season.

1. The MBA World Trophy
12 Books of Christmas

2. MBA World Trophy
The 12 books of Christmas
12 great business
books for the Startup
person in your life this
Christmas.
* Book photos courtesy of amazon.com

3. MBA World Trophy
On the first day of Christmas
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
The book that changed the way startups do business,
where we first heard MVP, Pivot and Build-MeasureLearn. A must read for any budding entrepreneur,
business
person
or
executive.
When
major
corporations such as GE and Toyota start
implementing its principles, it is clear that it has
become a movement. The Eric Ries blog is also well
worth a read
Find it here

4. MBA World Trophy
On the second day of Christmas
The Startup Owners Manual
Steve Blank and Bob Dorf
Steve Blank is the father of Lean Startup. His blog is an
incredible free resource. The startup Owners Manual is
a must read for any serious entrepreneur. It is a follow
on to the Four steps to the Epiphany. Steve Blank was
the founder or member of eight startups and now
lectures in Stanford and Berkeley. He recently had a
breakthrough piece published in the Harvard Business
review. This book helps entrepreneurs determine a
path from idea to scalable business model.
Find it here

5. MBA World Trophy
On the third day of Christmas
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
Gary Vaynerchuk
Is your company on social media? You are probably doing it
wrong. This is a streetwise, no holds barred guide to social
Media. Gary Vaynerchuk prides himself on being able to
predict future social media trends and see through the
clutter of social media to enable high impact relationships
with customers. This book is a must read if you have a social
media strategy and talks the reader through best practice in
everything from Facebook, and Twitter to Snapchat and
Tumblr. It is packed full of great insights and examples both
good and bad.
Find it here

6. MBA World Trophy
On the fourth day of Christmas
Business Model Generation
Alex Osterwalder & Yves
Pigneur
This book gave the world the business model canvas. If
you are not using it for your business, you really need to
start straight away. Universities and businesses around
the world are using business model canvasses to plot
out and record business models and changes over
time. This book is a collaboration of some of the best
business minds in the world and is visually epic. Here’s a
quick video about how it all works.
Find it here

7. MBA World Trophy
On the fifth day of Christmas
Moments of Impact
Lisa Kay Solomon & Chris Ertel
Although this book won’t be available until February, we
reckon it is important enough to merit a Pre-order this
Christmas. We met Lisa Kay Solomon recently and her
research in this topic is cutting edge.
The most precious resource any executive, manager or
entrepreneur has is time. This book uses ground breaking
research to design work systems to maximise efficiency at
meetings, workshops and all parts of the work day.
Find it here

8. MBA World Trophy
On the sixth day of Christmas
The Startup Playbook
David S Kidder
The Startup Playbook takes a no–nonsense approach to
understanding what it takes to be successful in business.
Former Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the year and serial
entrepreneur David Kiddler speaks to some of the biggest
names in the business world. From entrepreneurs to investors,
this book carefully draws out actionable insights on what has
made people from Steve Blank to Adeo Ressi, Ben Horowitz
and Elon Musk successful. It all makes for compelling
reading and is a big favourite of ours.
Find it here

9. MBA World Trophy
On the seventh day of Christmas
Crossing The Chasm
Geoffrey A Moore
While this book is by no means new, it was pretty ground
breaking for its time and while it is quite tech specific, it still
has many applications today. It is a marketing based book
that describes the technology adoption lifecycle curve and
explores how to best bring customers across the chasm of
adoption. The book is a proverbial bible about getting a
new product to market and all the steps to take and pitfalls
to avoid. This book takes a holistic company wide approach
and should be required reading for any startup.
Find it here

10. MBA World Trophy
On the eighth day of Christmas
Big Data,
Viktor Mayer Schonberger &
Kenneth Neil Cukier
Big Data is predicted to be a $16bn market in 2014. So
essentially, that means it is the only game in town. This is a
great book with tremendous insights into how some
dynamic companies are taking advantage of the enormous
resource that is big data. A fascinating and insightful book
that probably raises more questions than it answers but a
must read as far as we are concerned.
find it here

11. MBA World Trophy
On the ninth day of Christmas
David and Goliath
Malcom Gladwell
In actual fact, all of Malcom Gladwell books are compelling
reads. We would thoroughly recommend Outliers and The
Tipping Point. David and Goliath is his latest book. Gladwell
is a hugely entertaining writer and has given us some of the
most interesting business insights such as the 10,000 hours
rule. This book examines why perceived underdogs regularly
defeat the odds to come out on top. In today’s world of
global corporations, every startup has a David v Goliath
type battle on its hands to succeed. However Gladwell
argues that it’s far from mission impossible.
find it here

12. MBA World Trophy
On the tenth day of Christmas
The Entrepreneurs Guide to
Customer Development
Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits
This book acts as a type of cheat sheet or Cliffs notes for
Steve Blank’s first book, Four steps to the Epiphany which
was a breakthrough book in customer development. Every
start up will fail without customers for that reason alone, this
book is worth a careful read.
find it here

13. MBA World Trophy
On the eleventh day of Christmas
The Decoded Company
Leerom Segal, Aaron Goldstein,
Jay Goldman & Rahaf Harfoush
In this book, the authors argue that to attain sustainable
competitive advantage, companies must become
a Decoded Company: talent-centric, data-driven, flexible,
and fast. This can be done by harnessing the power of your
team and getting the best from them rather than the better
of them. This is a powerful concept and we think could be a
potential differentiator between otherwise identical
companies. The book is pre order at the moment but we felt
its underlying ideas were powerful enough to make our list
Find it here

14. MBA World Trophy
On the twelfth day of Christmas
Lean Analytics
Alastair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz
The Lean Startup has spawned a series of related books. This
is our favourite. It is a guide on how to most efficiently
monitor the analytics of your startup. It provides a step by
step guide on how to determine the appropriate actionable
metrics and KPI’s and how to effectively measure the data
to provide meaningful results. “One of the key points of this
book is that mistakes and failures are not the enemy information blindness is”.
Find it here

15. Happy Christmas from all at the MBA
World Trophy.
We will be launching The University Startup Network and
some exciting new events in January 2014
Find out more
www.tusn.org
Hit us up
info@tusn.org
Watch us tweet
@tusnorg