The Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: Strategies

“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”
– Sun Tzu

In pursuing any entrepreneurial objective, be it setting up a business or finding some way to do sustainable development for a poor country, you need a game plan in achieving your goals. There must be a concrete objective that you are gearing towards to and you need to dive down to the specifics in establishing the milestones and timeline of the plan. I have a couple of books on strategies which I feel that every entrepreneur need to have in their bookshelf. These books will help you to examine the following questions in the realm of business and enterprise: “What differentiates my product from the other companies? What is our unique sellling point? What are our company’s competitive advantages? How can we successfully take out the rest of our competitors?”

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

This is a timeless classic on strategy which permeates across different cultures. The strategies for war in Sun Tzu’s book are always reinterpreted in a modern context, particularly in competitions between different businesses. It is in this book that you will find old wisdom such as “know your enemy and you will win a thousand victories”. One important understanding is that Sun Tzu interprets that the cardinal rule is survival in a war between nations, contrary to Clausewitz’s idea (see his biok “On War”) that war is an instrument to compel other nations to do what the attacking nation wants.

Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter

If you want a good reference that compiles the techniques for analyzing industries and competitors, I believe that this is the ideal book for you. Michael Porter has broken down the forces which drives industry competition into the following: you have the industry competitors in the centre, and the other forces feeding into the rivalry of the existing firms, for example, the potential entrants, the suppliers, the buyers and the suppliers. Once he laid down the issues that existed within an industry, he offered three potential generic strategic approaches to outperform the other firms in an industry, that is broken down into: 1. overall cost leadership, 2. differentiation and 3. focus.

Competitive Advantage by Michael Porter

Of course, this is the sequel to the previous book. In this book, Porter discusses how the concept of a value chain disaggregates a company into “activities” or discrete functions or processes which represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage. Primarily, it builds on the generic strategies in the first book into practice. It is definitely written for practitioners who are responsible for a firm’s strategy and must decide on how to gain competitive advantage, as well as those who wants to understand and their performance better.

The Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Rennee Mauborgne