Financial Intelligence by Karen German and Joe Knight is an incredibly helpful book for managers at large companies to make sense of the accounting and finance drivers shaping their work. The book certainly covers the basics of how to read standard financial reports, but goes much further. The book is especially strong in helping managers to know what questions to ask of accounting and financial professionals and to understand how their decisions can improve the financial performance of their employer. I took my first “finance for non-financial managers” class nearly 30 years ago and since then have earned an MBA with a finance emphasis and yet this book still helped me to better understand some concepts. It’s an easy to read book that is well worth the time investment. I strongly recommend it.

Read my full review here.

Unleash Your Cash Flow Mojo by Sandra S. Simmonsis a book for business owners who probably haven’t had a lot of training in financial management. It provides a simple and straightforward approach to cash management that likely would keep many otherwise challenged businesses out of trouble. The book costs $10 on Amazon (either paperback or Kindle) and only takes a couple of hours to read — likely a worthwhile investment for the vast majority of small business owners who have focused more on doing their company’s work than on the details of cash management, and therefore might find themselves in a cash crunch at some point in the life (and possibly near-death) of their business.

Read the full review here.

I like books. At ClearPurpose, I often write brief reviews of books I’ve recently read. So far, I’ve written 74 reviews and those reviews are usually pretty positive — likely due to selection bias. But which books have actually been the most helpful to me in understanding and explaining business? In my various articles at ClearPurpose, I’ve referenced 134 different books.

Here are the 10 I’ve referenced the most (along with the links to the articles that reference each book):

• Built to Last (2020–07–01, 2020–07–24, 2020–08–11, 2020–08–17, 2022–03–14)
• Competitive Strategy (2020–06–28, 2020–07–01, 2020–07–27, 2020–09–03, 2022–07–19)
• Competing for the Future (2020–04–13, 2020–04–22, 2020–08–04, 2022–02–28, 2022–03–14)
• The Lean Startup (2020–04–24, 2020–05–12, 2021–03–11, 2021–03–27, 2022–10–25)
• Traction (2021–12–24, 2022–01–05, 2022–07–11, 2022–07–19, 2022–08–02)
• The Startup Owners Manual (2020–04–24, 2020–04–29, 2020–05–13, 2020–08–25, 2020–09–04, 2021–03–05)
• Business Model Generation (2020–04–06, 2020–04–08, 2020–04–15, 2020–04–23, 2020–04–23, 2020–05–01, 2020–07–01, 2020–09–10, 2022–07–19, 2022–10–25)
• Blue Ocean Strategy (2020–04–06, 2020–04–20, 2020–05–28, 2020–05–29, 2020–07–01, 2020–09–01, 2021–04–26, 2021–09–30, 2022–03–14, 2022–09–05, 2022–12–30)
• Value Proposition Design (2020–04–06, 2020–04–08, 2020–04–15, 2020–04–23, 2020–04–27, 2020–04–28, 2020–08–27, 2020–09–04, 2021–02–20, 2021–03–13, 2021–11–26, 2022–09–05, 2022–10–25)
• The Bible (2020–04–06, 2020–04–21, 2020–04–23, 2020–04–29, 2020–05–11, 2020–05–12, 2020–08–18, 2020–08–19, 2020–08–20, 2020–09–02, 2022–02–14, 2022–03–21, 2022–04–04, 2022–05–02, 2022–05–30, 2022–09–09)

So far in 2022, I’ve written 61 articles here at ClearPurpose. Since launching the publication in 2020 I’ve written approximately 300 articles in total. It’s always interesting to me to see which stories are most popular with you, our readers. You may also be interested to see which of our stories are most popular to see if you’ve missed anything throughout the year.

Here are the 10 stories that were most viewed by readers in 2022. Four were written this year, two are from 2021, and the remaining four are from 2020. These are listed in order of popularity starting with the most viewed:

1. What is Strategy? (2022)
2. Making Strategy from Scratch (2022)
3. What is a Business Operating System? (2022)
4. Book Brief: HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Strategy (2020)
5. Book Brief: The Discipline of Market Leaders (2020)
6. The Diamond-and-Square Framework (2021)
7. The Customer Network Strategy Generator (2021)
8. Scenario Analysis (2022)
9. Book Brief: Competing in the Age of AI (2020)
10. Competitive Strategy (2020)

As a bonus, here are 10 articles from this year that I think should’ve been more popular than they were, based on the articles that many of you liked:

1. What is Your Vision? (February)
2. How to Sell More (October)
3. How Can You Effectively Communicate? (April)
4. What is Company Culture? (April)
5. What is Marketing? (September)
6. Book Brief: The Unicorn Within (October)
7. Book Brief: Scaling Up (November)
8. Book Brief: The Advantage (May)
9. Book Brief: Traction (January)
10. “How Do I Involve God in My Business?” (November)

May you have a blessed 2023 and may my articles continue to serve you well. Let me know if there’s anyway I can help you or your business.

In the summer of 2022, Southwest Airlines cancelled over six thousand flights. At the time, CEO Bob Jordan said “We actually had really good performance”. He said that because he was benchmarking Southwest’s performance against the rest of the airline industry which cancelled over 45,000 flights. Southwest cancelled 1.8% of their flights compared to American Airlines’ 4.6%. But Southwest’s vision is “to be the world’s most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline.” Leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded doesn’t measure up to that standard.

Jordan and Southwest didn’t take the warning signals of this past summer seriously and this week the airline’s festering problems have led them to cancel more than half their flights each day. Ironically, the problems stem at least partially from the company’s founding desire to stand apart as one that truly cares about its passengers. How did the company get here and what does it need to do now?

Read the full article here.

Almost everyone feels “swamped” at times (and most of us feel that way often). Redeeming Your Time by Jordan Raynor provides a Biblical framework for escaping that helpless feeling and suggests over 30 different specific practices you can implement today to put the principles to work. Although some of the practices build upon each other, you don’t need to adopt all of them to start enjoying some of the benefits. You can start with one practice today and then build on it as you feel able. 

If you want to set a New Years goal of improving your time management, I strongly recommend this book.

Read my full review here.

Get Backed by Evan Baehr and Evan Loomis is a great book for any entrepreneur who expects to raise equity funding for his business. 

Not only does the book explain the mechanical and definitional aspects of the fund raising process, but more importantly it teaches the relational realities necessary to be successful in building your venture. The teaching/writing style is gentle and encouraging and the authors use plenty of real-world stories and examples to help the reader get a true sense for what it looks like when done right. This book is one of the best at teaching how to build a pitch deck, and yet it is so much more. I strongly recommend it to anyone involved in raising money for any venture. 

I also recommend reading Part Two before reading Part One. I’ve had this book for more than 5 years. I’ve really appreciated the first part of the book and recommended it to others as a great guide for how to build a pitch deck. But I had never actually read the book until now. Part Two explains the key things an entrepreneur needs to understand about raising funding. This is at least as important as knowing how to put together a pitch deck and without this background, building the deck lacks the context to approach the exercise with the subtlety needed to truly connect with potential investors.

Read the full review here.

Anthony Kennada was Chief Marketing Officer of Gainsight when he wrote Category Creation. Gainsight had successfully created the Customer Success category. In writing the book he also spoke to a number of other marketing leaders who had helped create other Software as a Service categories (like HubSpot) and looked at earlier examples (like Salesforce) in order to develop a guide for how a company can create a new product category.

Category Creation describes the discipline as a “long term greedy” endeavor. It takes significant investment and patience before a company can reap the benefits of creating a category. Therefore it would be wise for companies that think they might have the opportunity and desire to create a new category to read this book to know what they are getting into and to have a general sense of how to go about it.

While readers may hope for a step-by-step guide to making a new category, the heart of the book is a collection of seven general principles. There’s a lot of good content in this part of the book, but it’s uneven. Sometimes the advice is very general and sometimes it’s very specific. Sometimes the observations seem very specific to Gainsight; sometimes they seem applicable to B2B SaaS companies like Gainsight; and sometimes they seem like they might be more broadly applicable. Overall, this is the most helpful part of the book, but the reader needs to exercise discretion in figuring out whether and how she can apply the lessons to her specific situation.

Bottom line, Category Creation is well worth reading by anyone considering trying to create a new product category. There are many helpful principles and lessons learned from companies who have successfully done so in the past. However, readers should have realistic expectations for how successful the book will be in fully delivering on its promise.

Read my full review here.

I hoped that The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time by Verne Harnish and the Editors of Fortune would not only tell me about great decisions, but would also explain how those decisions were made. Some of the 18 chapters do exactly that, but most fall far short. The stories are usually still interesting and entertaining, so the book is an enjoyable read, just not as helpful as it could be.

Read the full review here.

Or, if you do want a book that describes decisions (whether great or not) and how they were made, you might enjoy my book on decisions made throughout the 100+ year history of one company. You can download it for free (or order a printed copy) here: https://blog.sdgstrategy.com/a-sprint-to-the-finish/

Almost by definition growth is foundational to both startups and scaling enterprises. However, the nature of that growth and how it is achieved changes dramatically as a business matures. Similarly, the role of the company’s leader in that growth will also change. If you are the founder of a startup transitioning to become CEO of a scaling enterprise, what do you need to do to successfully navigate those changes and keep your business on a healthy growth trajectory?

In the article linked below, I explore how Marketing, Sales, and Scaling Operations change as a business moves through three phases: startup, as it begins to scale, and as it begins to mature.

Read the full article here.