11 Books That Transformed My Business and My Life

As a teenager I had a period of many years where I
stopped reading books completely. I even remember a
time where I couldn’t imagine reading books at all. After
I graduated and started to be interested in business and
startups, I realized the immense power and knowledge
contained within books , and I started reading more and
more. Today, I can’t imagine even a couple of days
passing by without some time spent reading.
As an introvert, I’m a reflective person. Sometimes that
can be a challenge, since in a startup you really need to
get shit done. At the same time, I see it as one of my
strengths. I will sometimes go on a walk just to ponder
what’s currently going on in the company and the things
we could improve. Sometimes it’s my reflectiveness that
I find helps us to untangle some of the most complex
challenges we find ourseles confronted with.
I’ve found that due to this natural desire to reflect, I love
to read books and think about what we could try to apply
at Buffer. On top of this, at Buffer we give all new team
members (and family members) a Kindle and have
an unlimited Kindle books program (no limits and no
questions asked).
Content Continues Below
Here are some of the books which have had the biggest
impact on Buffer and me personally.
1. How to Win Friends & Influence People by
Dale Carnegie
“In such technical lines as
engineering, about 15 percent of
one’s financial success is due to
one’s technical knowledge and
about 85 percent is due to skill in
human engineering – to personality
and the ability to lead people.” –
Dale Carnegie
I first read How to Win Friends and Influence
People perhaps a year before I started Buffer, around 5
years ago. It instantly had an impact for me, both on
how I wanted to improve my character and how I wanted
to run a company.
A lot of what Carnegie proposes doesn’t seem all that
profound, and can even seem like common sense.
Simple things like “don’t criticize, condemn or complain,”
“smile,” “become genuinely interested in other people,”
and “ask questions instead of giving direct orders.” What
I’ve found is that it is incredibly difficult to put into
practice. On top of that, this is not about a few tricks to
get ahead, as Carnegie puts it, this is “a new way of
life.”
Related: Why Students Absolutely Should Create
Startups
For myself personally, I have become so convinced that
the How to Win Friends way of life is the one I want to
live, that I now try to read this book every few months,
both on Kindle and via audiobook, in order that I can
completely engrain the principles and they can become
who I am. I’ m up to around 12 reads of it so far, and I
don’t imagine ever stopping re-reading.
When I introduced my co-founder Leo to the book in the
earliest few months of Buffer, he too was hooked and
we had endless conversations and discussions around
the stories and principles. He helped me grow as a
person much more than I could alone, due to his
excitement and interest of the How to Win Friends way.
The result of this has been that we have based a large
number of the values within the Buffer culture directly on
the principles Carnegie proposes.
2. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make
the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins
“You must never confuse faith that
you will prevail in the end— which
you can never afford to lose—with
the discipline to confront the most
brutal facts of your current reality,
whatever they might be.” – Jim
Collins
Good to Great is one of the first transformative books I
read as Buffer started to grow beyond a product, and
into a company. This happened when we were around 7
people and I started to feel like we needed to think about
“culture”, a concept that I previously had no real way to
understand apart from conceptually.
As the team grew beyond 7, I noticed that team
dynamics came much more into play, and we couldn’t
assume that everyone knows everything anymore. In
addition, I realized that the people we work with affect
us immensely.
Good to Great helped me to understand how important
culture is for building a great, lasting company that has
an impact on the world. It started to become clear
that we already had a culture, and it was evolving. The
book helped me to understand thatculture can be crafted
by choice rather than rather than simply observed:
“Greatness is not a function of
circumstance. Greatness, it turns
out, is largely a matter of conscious
choice.” – Jim Collins
Perhaps one of the most difficult yet crucial learnings
for me from Good to Great was that there will be people
whose values don’t align with the culture we create, and
who will do better and thrive in a different company
rather than staying on as part of Buffer. Asking these
people to leave is one of the hardest things I’ve had to
learn how to do, and something that has made Buffer
what it is today.
3. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
“When we love, we always strive to
become better than we are. When
we strive to become better than we
are, everything around us becomes
better too.” – Paulo Coelho
Reading The Alchemist the first time was a very
liberating experience for me. It helped me to dream big
and keep following my gut, and not settle – which is
what the story, about a shepherd boy named Santiago, is
all about. It’s a simple and short book and has stook in
my mind ever since I read it.
The Alchemist conveys a powerful idea: that the world
will help you if you just choose to follow your dream,
that often times our upbringing and environment lead us
to believe dreams are impossible to realize, and that it
won’t be a smooth journey and that is fine.
“It’s the possibility of having a
dream come true that makes life
interesting” – Paulo Coelho
If you ever happen to find yourself becoming skeptical or
feeling that you’re not enjoying what you do, I can
recommend reading The Alchemist .
4. Joy At Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun
on the Job by Dennis Bakke
“Leaders who want to increase joy
and success in the workplace must
learn to take most of their personal
satisfaction from the achievements
of the people they lead, not from
the power they exercise.” – Dennis
Bakke
Joy At Work provides great insight into the journey of
Dennis Bakke and AES, the company he co-founded.
Bakke and his partner Roger Sant started the company
and strived to live to a core value of fun. It is a
fascinating read in terms of their definition of fun
(making important decisions and being given trust, not
ping pong tables and snacks), and also in how difficult
they found it to run the company unconventionally in
order to be true to their values.
AES reached over 40,000 employees all across the world
and they created a significantly different corporate
structure than many organizations of today. At Buffer,
AES and Bakke have been a big inspiration for us in
staying true to our own values.
A large part of the process of staying true to the value
of fun for Bakke was for him to be a sevant leader and
to help individuals in the company make as many
important decisions as possible. They devised
the Decision Maker method of making decisions as a
team, where the person closest to the problem (rather
than a manger) makes key decisions. He also wrote a
fable called The Decision Maker around this concept,
which I have also included in this list.
5. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing
Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High
Performance and Personal Renewal by Tony
Schwartz & Jim Loehr
“Because energy capacity
diminishes both with overuse and
with underuse, we must balance
energy expenditure with intermittent
energy renewal.” – Tony Schwartz &
Jim Loehr
The Power of Full Engagement was one of the first books
that helped me to start to understand myself, and to
work to embrace how I feel and be intuitive. The key
concept in the book is that you should be either fully
engaged in a task, or fully disegaged and finding
renewal. For example, finding the natural dips within
your day and thinking about rituals and changes you
could make. Maybe you go for a 20-minute walk at 3pm
when you naturally find yourself less productive.
The other thing this book revealed to me was the idea of
having 4 key types of energy: physical, mental,
emotional and spiritual. We should work on each of
these separately, and with each we can expand our
capacity by stretching ourselves and then renewing. It
uses the analogy of muscle growth to describe this a lot,
and argues that the same approach can be used for our
other types of energy.
For me, reading this book triggered many changes over
time to my routine. I started exercising almost every day,
and I tried a ritual of an evening walk to wind down
before sleeping. All these experiments have helped me
to feel happier and more productive, and many of them I
have kept for several years now, with compounding
benefits as a result.
6. The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way
Work Works by Ricardo Semler
“For a company to excel, employees
must be reassured that self-interest,
not the company’s, is their foremost
priority. We believe an employee
who puts himself first will be
motivated to perform.” – Ricardo
Semler
Ricardo Semler took over his father’s business, Semco,
in 1980 under the condition that he could change it
completely. On his first day as CEO, he fired 60% of all
top managers. Since then he has introduced a wide
range of unconventional practices, such as having no
official working hours, employees choosing their own
salaries, and having no vision (instead wanting
employees to find the way using their instinct).
For me, The Seven-Day Weekend opened my eyes and
helped me to question every business practice that
exists today. Semler aimed to operate as a ‘sevant
leader’ and made a conscious effort to make zero
decisions himself.
7. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick
Lencioni
“Team members who are not
genuinely open with one another
about their mistakes and
weaknesses make it impossible to
build a foundation for trust.” –
Patrick Lencioni
A leadership fable about a failing Silicon Valley tech
company who brings in a new CEO. Kathryn attempts to
unite a highly dysfunctional team and through his
narrative Lencioni explains the five key ways that teams
struggle, and how to overcome the hurdles.
I read this book at a key point in time where we were
just discovering that we needed to put our values into
words and shape the culture of Buffer. The book helped
to clarify that through culture, provided we lived it, we
could solve problems of trust and enable much better
teamwork within the company.
8. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits,
Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh
“Our philosophy has been to take
most of the money we would have
spent on paid advertising and invest
it into customer service and the
customer experience instead, letting
our customers do the marketing for
us through word of mouth.” – Tony
Hsieh
Zappos has always been a huge inspiration for us at
Buffer. I clearly remember watching a video interview
Tony Hsieh had where he was asked what one thing he
would do sooner if he could start Zappos again. He
replied “put values in place on day 1.” We had already
started Buffer, but we established our values shortly after
that when we were 7 people.
On top of their focus on culture and values, Zappos has
also provided us with inspiration for making half of our
vision “to set the bar for great customer support.” We
have always had a large happiness team compared to
the ratios other companies have, and we find great joy in
aiming to surprise and wow customers with how quickly
and caringly we respond to Tweets and emails.
9. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early
Days by Jessica Livingston
“Starting a startup is a process of
trial and error. What guided the
founders through this process was
their empathy for the users. They
never lost sight of making things
that people would want.” – Jessica
Livingston
I read Founders at Work in the earliest few months of
Buffer, before I had managed to drop my freelance work
which I was doing on the side to pay the bills before our
revenues grew. It was inspirational and practical at the
same time, and laid out very clearly the paths that many
of the biggest tech successes took to reach their
prominence.
10. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to
Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld & David
Cohen
“Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You
can never fully anticipate how an
audience is going to react to
something you’ve created until it’s
out there. That means every
moment you’re working on
something without it being in the
public arena, it’s actually dying,
deprived of the oxygen of the real
world.” – Brad Feld & David Cohen
There is so much great content packed into this book
across all aspects of a start: ideas, execution, culture,
hiring, firing, fundraising, product, metrics, incorporation,
work-life balance. It is a book I can highly recommend if
you’re interested in or are getting started with a startup.
Brad Feld and David Cohen are super smart and have a
lot of experience, and it shows.
I especially loved the chapter titled “If you want money,
ask for advice.” It’s something I’ve tried to apply ever
since reading the book. I’ve found that genuinely seeking
advice is often more productive and leads to more
opportunities than asking for money or a partnership or
a sale.
The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a
Life While Making a Living by Randy Komisar
“And then there is the most
dangerous risk of all — the risk of
spending your life not doing what
you want on the bet you can buy
yourself the freedom to do it later.”
– Randy Komisar
I first heard the term ‘deferred life plan’ in this fantastic
book by Randy Komisar. It has been especially relevant
for me, since it is a story about a silicon valley
entrepreneur and teaches the idea that there are many
things more important than money. The book poses the
question “what would you be willing to do for the rest of
your life?” and persuasively argues that if you will do
that, the money will follow.