13 Best Books for Entrepreneurs: A Holiday Gift Guide

Buying gifts for the entrepreneurs and other business-minded folks in your life can be challenging. But, if you’re looking for a practical gift (no, not another pen), you can’t go wrong with any one of these best books for entrepreneurs. After all, one thing all entrepreneurs and business owners never have enough of is knowledge.

So, here's a list of books that I think would make the perfect holiday gift this year (presented alphabetically by title).

13 best books for entrepreneurs on your shopping list

Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months

by Melinda Emerson

Melinda Emerson has revised and expanded her bestselling book, Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months, to reflect today’s pandemic-impacted world. The new material focuses on marketing, social media and content, selling online, building a sales process, and building leadership skills.

Emerson, whom I’ve known for years, says she designed the book to help readers launch a new business, reinvent a business, or help current business owners complete their digital pivot. The book provides a step-by-step, month-to-month plan to take aspiring entrepreneurs from idea to startup.

Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months ($16.99) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces That Drive Your Organization’s Success

by Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry, and Greg Urban

You would think business owners/managers would understand the culture their employees experience. But according to authors Mario Moussa, Derek Newberry, and Greg Urban (who are also corporate anthropologists and leadership experts), most don’t quite get it. They write, “Whether you are trying to execute a bold new strategy, make your business more agile and creative, or pull off a major acquisition, culture will make or break your efforts. But culture baffles even the smartest leaders. All too often, they assume it will take care of itself. Yet it never does.”

They define culture as a “process of learning and adaptation that begins when any group of people—a ‘tribe’—comes together to get things done.” The authors say you should cultivate culture like you would a garden. And that the “Four Forces” that drive culture—vision, interests, habits, and innovation—function like the natural forces of soil, water, and sunlight, combining to produce a thriving, diverse organization.

You’ll find illustrations from New Yorker cartoonist Kendra Allenby throughout the book, as well as a proprietary “Culture Evaluator” tool.

The Culture Puzzle ($27.95) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

Dear Chairwoman: Letters From Today’s Trailblazing Women Board Leaders to the Fearless Directors of Tomorrow

By Rika Nakazawa

The numbers are disheartening. As of a year ago, women reportedly held less than a quarter of board seats among the country’s largest publicly traded companies on the Russell 3000 Index. And approximately 7.4% of the 500 largest public U.S. companies (by revenue) have a female chair.

These facts led author Rika Nakazawa, whose life work is to help advance women executives, to write Dear Chairwoman, which features the voices and personal stories of women leaders worldwide who have trailblazed their way to the boardroom.

The stories are presented as personal letters to the next generation of women and designed to “enlighten, prepare and inspire” them to pursue board-level positions.” The different stories highlight that there is more than one path to success.

Dear Chairwoman ($9.95) is available at Amazon.

Disaster Proof: Scenario Planning for a Post-Pandemic Future

By Lance Mortlock

At this moment, it’s unclear when we will enter the post-pandemic future. And author Lance Mortlock, an EY senior strategy partner, says, “We have no idea what the post-pandemic future is going to look like.”

Covid-19 not only disrupted businesses, but Mortlock says it also created a “landscape of VUCA—volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—that will not fade away as quickly we would hope. And, he adds, “If there’s one thing we can all count on, it’s that change is constant.”

So, Mortlock asks, “How do we plan for a future we can’t predict?” He recommends using scenario planning, “a powerful tool that has been in use by the world’s leading corporations for decades.” And he provides a six-step plan and actionable guide to deploying this strategy.

Disaster Proof ($35) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent book stores.

Get Different: Marketing That Can’t Be Ignored!

By Mike Michalowicz

I’ve known serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz a long time and can personally attest that he thinks differently than most of us. That’s a plus in the business world.

Are you frustrated with your marketing’s effectiveness? Is it increasingly difficult to stand out in a crowded marketplace? Even if you have the best product or offer the best service, Michalowicz explains consumers don’t really care. To them, “Better is not actually better. Different is better. And those who market differently win.”

In Get Different, Michalowicz uses real-life stories of entrepreneurs to unveil his “effective and radically simple” new way to market your small business. He advises business owners to ask themselves three simple yet critical questions about their marketing ideas:

Does it differentiate?
Does it attract?
Does it direct?

The key to marketing success, says Michalowicz, is “mastering the millisecond moments where prospects decide to engage or ignore your marketing.”

Mike’s a funny guy. His humor permeates this book, which makes it an easy, entertaining, and informative read.

Get Different ($26) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

How People Become Famous: Geniuses Of Self-Marketing from Albert Einstein To Kim Kardashian

By Rainer Zitelmann

While you may not want to be famous, you do want to succeed. Rainer Zitelmann, a historian, sociologist, and prolific author, says the key to both is by becoming a master of self-marketing. His book profiles 12 successful celebrities (including Albert Einstein, Andy Warhol, Stephen Hawking, Muhammad Ali, Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Kim Kardashian, and Princess Diana) who achieved fame by doing just that.

Zitelmann says the celebrities profiled understand the importance of the art of self-promotion. This is important for entrepreneurs because to succeed you have to be able to sell yourself. “It’s just not enough to be good in your field,” says Zitelmann. You need a strategic plan to build your brand, and Zitelmann says you need to be disciplined about it.

He says the celebrities he profiled were “not good at obeying others ... but they were very good at obeying themselves.” Sounds like an entrepreneur to me. Zitelmann presents several shortcuts to achieving fame. My favorite: Don’t forget to cluck if you lay an egg. He writes, “Do what chickens do! Chickens cluck when they lay an egg.” They follow a basic principle of self-marketing instead of living by “outdated virtues,” such as don’t be a show-off or don’t blow your own horn.

To succeed, says Zitelmann, “it is necessary to understand your brand and make it work for you.”

How People Become Famous ($20.99) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas

By Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal

Entrepreneurs know that one of the secrets to success is overcoming resistance to new ideas. The authors of The Human Element, Loran Nordgren and David Schonthal, both professors at the Kellogg School of Management (Schonthal is also the director of entrepreneurship programs there), maintain that “successful changemakers learn that they have to overcome the deeply rooted frictions that oppose the very nature of change.”

Their book explains how many business owners think adding more features and benefits to their products or services will excite others in the same way it excites them. But, the authors say, “increasing the appeal of the idea itself is only a part of the equation that unlocks widespread adoption of the idea.” They also discuss the Four Frictions—inertia, effort, emotion, and reactance—that operate against every innovative new idea, product, or service and how you can overcome them.

If your goal is to introduce a new idea or innovation, The Human Element is a valuable how-to guide.

The Human Element ($27) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

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Lead With We: The Business Revolution That Will Save Our Future

By Simon Mainwaring

Author Simon Mainwaring is the founder of a strategic consultancy “that turns companies into movements by empowering their brands to lead with a purpose larger than themselves.” His client list includes legendary businesses like Starbucks and Disney.

In Lead With We, Mainwaring explains how we can make our businesses more environmentally friendly and purpose-driven. He also says we need to:

Shift our organizational mindset to one that aligns its profit with its purpose by placing the collective above the individual.
Rewrite the story of business to one of shared responsibility.
Recruit customers to serve as ambassadors for our businesses.

Lead With We ($27) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

Marketing 3-4-5: The Business Owner’s Guide to Effective Local Marketing in 15-Minutes or Less

By Brian Ostrovsky

As the CEO of Locable, a company that powers nearly 200 local media websites, Brian Ostrovsky knows about marketing. Marketing 3-4-5 was first created as a program presented to small business owners at local workshops and state programs.

Ostrovsky thinks too many small business owners are intimidated by marketing, assuming they don’t have enough time to do it right or they don’t even know where to start. But he says, “Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming, and it doesn’t have to be expensive.”

But since small businesses have to market their businesses, he created the Marketing 3-4-5 system, which consists of:

3 reasons you do marketing
4 reasons people choose to work with you
5 ways they find you

Ostrovsky says this book is not about turning you into a marketing superstar, but instead, he wants to show you how you can use “your two unfair advantages—authenticity and relationships—to take back local and successfully practice effective local marketing.” Plus, he says you can learn to do this in only 10 to 15 minutes, and “creativity is not required.”

Marketing 3-4-5 ($16.99) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

No Bullsh!t Leadership

By Martin Moore

Author Martin Moore is the founder of Your CEO Mentor and host of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. He says he wrote this book to “take the BS out of the way we lead.”

Moore believes business owners/leaders must deliver value or they’re not leading, and must explain how to create value in their business by focusing on what matters most. He also reveals how to lead through a crisis, become comfortable with conflict, and build a high-performing (diverse) team. Finally, he believes you can learn to be an exceptional leader and shares seven leadership imperatives to help you get there.

At the end of every chapter, he asks a series of questions about what was covered in the chapter and lets you rate yourself so you can gain more insight on what you’ve learned and what more you need to know.

No Bullsh!t Leadership ($26.99) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

Small Business Revolution: How Owners and Entrepreneurs Can Succeed

By Barry McCarthy

Barry McCarthy is the president and CEO of Deluxe Corp., and his book, Small Business Revolution, features stories and anecdotes from the company’s long history with small business owners and from its Emmy-nominated television show, Small Business Revolution, a reality series that revitalizes the small businesses in a different community every season.

The book covers all the critical aspects of running a small business. McCarthy provides practical and actionable advice on reaching customers, attracting employees, understanding finances, controlling costs, finding and retaining customers, and more. And he explains how to do all that in a booming economy or a post-pandemic environment.

Small Business Revolution is a valuable resource, whether you’re just starting out or if you’ve been running your own business for years.

All proceeds from the book benefit the Deluxe Corporation Foundation, “which has awarded nearly $110 million in grants to strengthen American communities, from financial literacy programs to job-skills training.”

Small Business Revolution ($25) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

The Widest Net: Unlock Untapped Markets and Discover New Customers Right in Front of You

By Pamela Slim

Pamela Slim starts with the premise that you, as a small business owner, have something meaningful to offer. But how do you find the people who need to know about it? She warns that while you may think you know your ideal customer, and may have even created an ideal customer profile, you need to think again.

Slim, a speaker, author, and business coach, shows you “how to build strong, diverse relationships, identify and connect with new partners, expand markets, generate leads, and find new customers in places you may never have considered.”

Social media, while a useful tool, is not the solution either, she argues, because it often “creates a comfortable cocoon for entrepreneurs." Instead, they “need to understand the entirety of the marketplace, not just their own social graph.” Instead, The Widest Net explains how you can “connect with potential customers using the true breadth of the marketplace.”

Slim calls it “an ecosystem of living connections” and shows you how to:

Attract new leads by learning more about them authentically.
Develop products and services suited to these customers.
Sell through a trusted reciprocity framework where your customers become part of your ecosystem, and you help each other grow.
Build and sustain loyalty and trust with new customers.

The Widest Net ($26) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.

Your Small Business Boom: Explosive Ideas to Grow Your Business, Make More Money, and Thrive in a Volatile World

By Steve Strauss

First, I should disclose that Steve Strauss is a good friend of mine. Strauss, a small business columnist for USA Today, has written over a dozen other books, but Your Small Business Boom is my favorite. You could say it’s a book that meets the moment that we currently find ourselves in.

"Pivot" is a word we may all be tired of hearing, but the actual act of pivoting saved many a small business since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Strauss is a strong advocate for pivoting, and the book is filled with practical ideas for why you should and how you can pivot your small business. Strauss also explains the importance of digital marketing and the intricacies of getting money.

One part of the book focuses on solopreneurs, an often overlooked segment of the entrepreneurial universe, even though the overwhelming majority of small businesses in the United States don’t have any employees.

Strauss believes all small business owners have a superpower. He writes, “Using this power, we can chase big dreams, invent, create, do great work, right wrongs, support our teammates, hire rockstars, share good news, cut people slack, instigate, motivate, help friends, deliver on promises, and foster excellence. We can make a difference.”

Your Small Business Boom ($28) is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.