3 BOOKS

EVERY PROMISING ENTREPRENEUR SHOULD READ

By Dhafer Hasan - Entrepreneurship Consultant

I’m an expert and trainer of business innovation and behavioral change, have worked with several national and international organizations and was the manager of innovation for development project with UNDP over 7 years. I have been extremely passionate about business development and pursued it with everything I had, eventually becoming a leading player in Iraq’s intrapreneurial eco-system. With anything we choose to learn, I truly believe there are several ways to approach educating ourselves and we do not necessarily have to choose one of the other. It’s important to have the right mentors, those who have the right experience and can pass on that experience to you through practical approaches. However, there are means of learning that we can do ourselves and with minimal external help. Below I list three books that have proven to be invaluable to me throughout my career, and believe any promising entrepreneur can benefit from.

Reading this book is an eye-opening experience; asking why things catch on? Why do people share or care about some news or posts while ignoring others? The writer identifies six elements that would help you make your product or idea viral. With a lot of real-life examples this book will help you understand a lot about how people think and how to generate word-of-mouth about your business.

Contagious

By Jonah Berger

Buyology

By Martin Lindstrom

A very interesting book that addresses the “truth and lies about why we buy”. The Author reviews and explains a lot of studies and examples about how we react to advertisements. It is a psychology book focusing on consumer behaviors. This book is important because it is important for businesses to understand how they can influence customers to buy their products and services.

You may know that many institutions and individuals around the world use Design Thinking methodology to design their business, startup, products, services…etc. But this book argues that you can use Design Thinking to design your life, your personal and professional life. Based on their experience at Stanford University, the authors have developed this book to take you through a process to design or redesign your life using a set of tools to understand the problem, find solutions and prototype them.

Design Your Life

By Bill Burnett & Dave Evans