Whether you’re heading to the pool or heading out on a great overseas adventure, it’s time to update your summer reading list. And while fun and light beach reads are nice, there are some great business and technology books that you might want to check out. We’ve put together a list of books written by entrepreneurs across the Southeast, offering insights and inspiration for your summer of growth.
(And don’t worry, all these are real books you can buy or download!).
Books From Southeast Entrepreneurs and Authors
No One Is Self-Made: Build Your Village to Flourish in Business and Life
Lakeysha Hallmon, Atlanta-based founder of The Village Market
Synopsis from Harper Collins: From the visionary behind the groundbreaking Village Market, this inspirational guide dares to dismantle the myth of individualism and reveals how collective support can shatter systemic barriers to success.
It’s a bold roadmap for entrepreneurs and leaders determined to rewrite the rules of business.
Build Like It’s the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
Sandeep Ahuja and Patrick Chopson, co-founders of Atlanta-based cove
Synopsis from Wiley: Build Like It’s the End of the World stands as a compelling manifesto for the AEC industry, confronting the urgent challenges of climate change with actionable solutions. Authored by Sandeep Ahuja and Patrick Chopson, this text embarks on a journey to redefine the future of our built environment. Through a lens of decarbonization, it challenges established norms and introduces a new benchmark for sustainable design and construction.
Lunch with Lucy: Maximize Profits by Investing in Your People
Sherry (Stewart) Deutschmann, founder and CEO of Nashville-based BrainTrust
Synopsis from Amazon: On any given Wednesday, any employee could invite “Lucy” (Sherry’s midday moniker) out to lunch, at a place of their choice, with the bill picked up by Sherry. At these events, Sherry wasn’t the CEO. She was “Lucy,” a co-worker. By making herself 100% available, “Lucy” created a judgment-free environment where she could learn about a team member’s dreams, ambitions, and challenges—and gain their insight into what she was doing right or wrong as a leader. She credits this approach with the success of her company.
Lunch with Lucy’s interior, refreshingly laid out like courses on a menu, invites us to see how a leader’s choices directly impact employee morale, engagement, and commitment—and in this author’s case, ultimately led to a healthy and hearty bottom line. Sherry’s voice is new, and her honesty, humor, and humility shine through this story of a woman building a successful business through empathetic leadership and uncommon, commonsense business practices, one lunch at a time. Sit down at the table and learn about a business model that is truly transformational.
The Great Client Partner: How Soft Skills Are the True Currency in Client Relationships
Jared Belsky, CEO and co-founder of Atlanta-based firm Arcadia
Synopsis from Barnes & Noble: There’s no such thing as a “natural leader.” Great leaders have a set of abilities essential to working with and inspiring others, including trust building, persuasion, time management, principled negotiating, and active listening. All of these soft skills can be learned-and Jared Belsky, one of the country’s leading digital marketing CEOs, can show you how.The Great Client Partner is your guide to honing your soft skills to complement your technical expertise, making you ready to lead large teams, innovate, and build trust with your clients and internal and external stakeholders. When you master this rare combination of hard and soft skills, there’s no limit to how far your career can go. This book is your key to successful client relationships and incredible upward career mobility.
The Turnaround Leadership Series
Jeff Hilimire, Partner at The Purpose Group
Synopsis from Amazon: The Turnaround Leadership Series is written for leaders who aspire to be as impactful and Purpose-driven as possible. Written in a narrative style similar to Patrick Lencioni, the books can work together, building on the lessons throughout, or one-offs to help with a specific leadership challenge. The author has over 20 years of experience founding, building, selling, and acquiring businesses, and he pours everything he has learned along that journey into the books.
Unconstrained: Fueling Opportunities and Unsucking Your Business
Jeffrey Spence, founder and CEO of Georgia-based WithFuel
Synopsis from Bookshop.org: For over a century, entrepreneurs have been their own worst enemies-shackled by the same tired, conventional thinking that leads to lives of stress, boredom, and mediocrity (and nothing is worse than mediocrity). But the unconstrained do things differently. They refuse to play by the old rules, tearing down the myths about what it means to run a business and how to find the resources to fuel it. These leaders know that their real mission isn’t to just “run a company”-it’s to hunt down and fuel opportunities that are actually worth pursuing.
Unconstrained: Fueling Opportunities & Unsucking Your Business is a battle cry for entrepreneurs, CEOs, and business leaders tired of living in the hamster wheel of stress and stagnation. It’s a no-BS roadmap to becoming an unconstrained entrepreneur-a path that leads to freedom, massive growth, and finally, ditching the nonsense that’s been holding you back. If you’re ready to stop playing small and step into a life of relentless progress and real value creation, this is your guide.
Unbundling the Enterprise: APIs, Optionality, and the Science of Happy Accidents
Stephen Fishman, Atlanta-based CTO and Matt McLarty
Synopsis from Amazon: Drawing on real-world examples of both innovative “digital pirates” and legacy “digital settlers,” authors Stephen Fishman and Matt McLarty articulate strategies to unbundle business capabilities into reusable digital assets. You can rapidly combine and recombine these building blocks to capitalize on new opportunities and innovations as they emerge. For business and technology leaders, Unbundling the Enterprise provides an actionable methodology to engineer “happy accidents” and sustainable success in turbulent times. Underpinning their strategy are techniques tailored for digital business, like using APIs to create widespread optionality, designing digital business models focused on value exchange, and optimizing outcomes through tight feedback loops.
Good Company
Arthur Blank, co-founder of The Home Depot
Synopsis from Barnes & Noble: Blank left The Home Depot that same year with a burning question: Could the values and culture that made that company great be replicated? Good Company takes readers inside the story of how he did just that-turning around a struggling NFL team, rebooting a near-bankrupt retail chain, building a brand-new stadium, revitalizing a blighted neighborhood, launching a startup soccer club, and more.
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