The Best Books for Growing Your MSP Business
The 2018 MSP 501 ID'd the most effective books on leadership and business in the IT channel.
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What can you learn about business from poker? Quite a lot, actually, according to “Think in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.”
Poker champ-turned-business consultant Annie Duke teaches how to factor luck into your decision-making and think in probablilites. “I’m not sure” isn’t always a bad thing to say.
It might not seem natural at first to turn to a sociologist with an emphasis on vulnerability and shame to improve your business, but Brene Brown’s lessons hold value for anyone who wants to build their courage.
By learning to “embrace the suck,” Brown shows how perspective and empathy can turn ordinary people into great achievers. Her lessons on leadership have helped thousands of executives better connect both to their company cultures and their own employees.
Check out titles like “Daring Greatly,” “The Gifts of Imperfection” and her latest book, “Dare to Lead.”
Business consultant Les McKeown gives us his favorite tips on how to achieve sustainable, scalable growth in “Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization on the Growth Track and Keeping It There.“
It’s all about how to keep your processes simple, intuitive and accessible for everyone in order to be able to sustain and predict your business’s success.
Some things never change. In “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm,” Verne Harnish asserts there are a core group of fundamentals to great businesses that haven’t changed in more than a century.
The book includes Harnish’s One-Page Strategic Plan and a detailed explanation of eight practical actions you can take to get banks to finance your business.
It seems the business world loves a good yarn, because “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable” imparts some valuable wisdom via a short story.
The CEO of a ficticious company must figure out how to make a united team out of a disorganized, contentious mess. Along the way, we learn of five crippling characteristics of teams that struggle and receive actionable steps for how to identify them and overcome them.
Three prominent leaders of the DevOps movement take a fictional approach to teaching business strategy in “The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.”
This is a pretty fun read as far as business books go, and the fictional case study of IT manager Bill at Parts Unlimited shows what IT can learn from manufacturing when it comes to organizing workflows, streamlining processes and improving communication.
Can a good company become a great company? If so, how
There’s no magic wand, but in “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t,” author Jim Collins studied 1,435 companies to see what makes a business successful over the long haul.
In the end, he landed on 11 organizations that had traits in common that went against the thinking of corporate America. What it takes to up your game might surprise you.
Hands down, the No. 1 most praised business book among our 501 is “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.”
Think you know what it takes to succeed as an SMB? Think again. Gerber walks readers through the entrepreneurial process, from inception to maturation, and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business model. If you want to know how the 501 does what they do, check out this book.
Hands down, the No. 1 most praised business book among our 501 is “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.”
Think you know what it takes to succeed as an SMB? Think again. Gerber walks readers through the entrepreneurial process, from inception to maturation, and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business model. If you want to know how the 501 does what they do, check out this book.
From Bill Gates to Barack Obama, the most successful individuals of our time will tell you that the key to staying ahead is constant learning. Successful business leaders go through dozens or even hundreds of books a year to learn about the latest innovations in business models, management techniques and operational processes to maximize efficiency and grow that elusive profit margin.
The companies on the 2018 MSP 501 are no different. These managed service providers are the best in the world, and they stay that way because they’re thirsty for knowledge. Though there is no end to the number of quality titles we could list, we polled our 501ers to find the most influential books and thought leaders in the channel. So sit back, flip through the slideshow above and get ready to get inspired.
Then, apply to be a part of the prestigious 2019 MSP 501. The deadline is May 31, so hurry!
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