Books for Women Entrepreneurs

[OmnivoreInk]

There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here.

It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new.

In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment!

1. The Old Girl's Network
2. Mother's Work
3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women
4. Pitch Like A Girl
5. Workplace Warrior
6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer
7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery
8. She Wins, You Win
9. Napoleon On Project Management
10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do

11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years
12. The One Minute Millionaire
13. Talking From 9 to 5
14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions
15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success
16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded
17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful
18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End
19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide
20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen

21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business
22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker
23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business
24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises
25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy
26. The Promotable Woman
27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it
28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home
29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women

[OmnivoreInk]

I recommend this book highly! Author Rebecca Matthias took a small mail-order business and turned it into a billion dollar industry - maternity wear for the business woman.

In this book she coverse everything the entrepreneur needs to know - illustrating each principle with examples from her own growing business. It's great for any entrepreneur, therefore, but since she's also a working mother there's some advice for the woman who feels guilty in working when she's got kids, etc.

1) Where ideas come from and how to test them in the marketplace
2) Nuts and bolts of launching a mail-order business
3) How to buy or manufacture your product
4) Asking for help (combining new business with new family)
5) Getting the hang of cash flow, credit, publicity, technology, taxes
6) Franchising takes us forward
7) How to raise money and keep cash flowing
How to handle disasters and other unforseeable crises
9) The art of negotiating
10) Going public: IPOs, Wallstreet, Private Jet, Realizing your dream..

[OmnivoreInk]

Haven't read this one yet...

Contents
A business of one's own: setting the stage
Passion: Turning what you love into a real business
Vision: Bringing Your Idea Into the World
Pioneering Spirit: Discovering new frontiers
Tenacity: Passions Bulldog
Raising Capital: Translating your vision into dollars and cents
Focus, feedback and flexibility
Leadership lessons
Life after the survival stage: Managing onward

There's a Took Kit in the back that has lots of good stuff, including:

Outline for competitive analysis: the basic issues to address before starting your company

Outline for executive summary and business plan, with sample summary

Explanation of non-disclosure agreement

Milestone setting

"Do you have what it takes" quiz

Sample financing term sheet

Due Diligence checklist

Sample advisory agreement

Process and systems review

Outsourcing overview

[OmnivoreInk]

and mystery author

http://www.fishingwithlinda.net/index.html

is the URL for her website.

She's a female entrepreneur who should be profiled...seems to have had a fascinating life. She was a swordfish boat captain for 17 years and was caught in "The Perfect Storm" (she was played in the movie (2000) by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), then retired to become a lobserman on the small island of Isle au Haut, and wrote the books The Hungry Ocean, The Lobster Chronicles, All Fishermen are Liars, a cookbook called Recipes from a Very Small Island.

And now she's come out with her very first mystery novel, Slipknot, featuring marine investigator Jane Bunker.

What a way to turn your career into books.... jeez I can't express how jealous I am!

Anyway, I've read The Hungry Ocean and The Lobster Chronicles and highly recommend them, and intend to pick up SlipKnot when its released.

[NewmanWrites]

Great topic!!

I've been looking for a few good books specifically about women entrepreneurs, so I'm going to have to take a good look at these.

Anyone else care to share any great books dealing with women in business they've read recently? I'm always looking to add to my collection!

[OmnivoreInk]

Picked up a few books on my weekly trip to the library, thought I'd share their tables of contents.

The 7 Greatest Truths about Successful Women: How You Can Achieve Financial Independence, Professional Freedom, and Personal Joy, by Marion Luna Brem.

From the inside cover: In 1984, battling both cervical and breast cancer, and facing $500,000 in medical bills and a disintegrating marriage, Marion Luna Brem was desperate to find a way to support herself and her two young sons. With more than a few strikes against her, she started knocking on doors, looking for a job. Seventeen doors later, the blunt speaking manager of a car dealership in central TExas declared, "I've been thinking of hiring a broad." And with that invitation, Marion took her own first step on the road to financial independence, yada yada yada

Today, this "broad" owns two automobile dealerships, an advertising agency, and a stake in a local bank. She sits on the boards of several businesses, etc. etc.

1. Who Wants to be her own boss?
2. Ladies, Start your engines
3. Resiliency
4. Nurturing
5. Intuition
6. Creativity
7. Passion
8. Self-Value
9. Sensitivity
10. Leadership
11. Balance

[OmnivoreInk]

Pitch Like A Girl: How a Woman Can Be Herself and Still Succeed
Ronna Lichtenberg
2005

From the inside cover:

"As a woman, you probably feel uncomfortable when it comes to promoting yourself and asking for what you want."

WHAT IN THE HECK IS THIS, I asked myself when I read that. Women are the fastest growing business owners in the US and Canada, there are t housands of women executives and CEOs - though not as many as might be expected, admittedly, yet the book opens with this surely out of date stereotype.

However, as she continued to give examples of women who had high paying jobs but were routinely not paid as much as men because it hadn't occurred to them to ask for raises, etc., I decided it was probably true for a majority of businesswomen...

Anyway, more of the info from the jacket:

"Other books have told you how to get what you want by being more like a guy. Pitch Like A Girl tells you why its an advantage to be who you are and how to do better by bringing more of yourself to work."

The TOC:

1. Pink and Blue
2. The Quck-dry Chapter
3. What's In your head that's not in his
4. The Me, Inc Mindset
5. Visioning: Discover What You Really Want
6. Identifying Prospects
7. Pre-pitch homework and heartwork
8. Crafting the pitch
9. Pricing the pitch
10. Packaging the pitch
11. Delivering the pitch
12. Closing
Conclusion
A Word to the guys
The Empathy Quotient
The Systemizing Quotient
Bibliography

And on a side note - non-fiction books without indexes - of which this is one, annoy me.

[OmnivoreInk]

Workplace Warrior: Insights and advice for winning on the corporate battlefield
Kay Hammer
2000

From the inside jacket:
Successful people don't get to the top without struggles. But few are willing to expose the failures and setbacks that have lined their paths through the battle zones of business.

Kay Hammer is that rare breed. With startling candor and penetrating intelligence, this "very modern, very American heroine (Forbes) gives a frank and full recounting of her mid-career reinvention, from a linguistics professor alone to the President, CEO, and co-founder of Evolutionary Technologies International...
Hammer's new life began with an epiphany - that nothing substantive in her life would change unless she made it happen. There would be no Prince Charming. From that moment on, she began a long, ardous journey to carve for herself in the youthful, male-dominated software industry-a journey which she likens to serving the apprenticeship of a medieval warrior...

Her strategies are geared for battles on all fronts: not only for disarming foes, gaining allies, and winning battles in the boardroom, but also for confronting the internal enemies of self-doubt, fear of failure, and unresolved anger.

[OmnivoreInk]

Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the New Consumer
Michael J. Silverstein
2006

From the inside jacket:

"Today's consumers can seem impossible to understand, and even harder to please. For instance, the average mall shopper will spend about $100, then leave when she hits that limit. SHe'll probably buy shoes rather than clothing, because she doesn't want to think about her dress size. And the store most likely to get her money isn't the one with the nicest display or the deepest discounts - it's the one closest to her parking spot."

Okay, ladies here at evancarmichael.com? Do you follow this generalization? I myself go to bookstores, and nowhere else. Being self-employed in a home office, I don't need to buy new clothes, but I confess I did buy a new pair of bike shoes recently...

The Introduction states:

"This book tells the story of how middle-class consumers around the world are reshaping the consumer-goods market by trading down to low-price products and services, trading up to premium ones, and avoiding the boredom and low value that increasingly characterizes the middle. These consumers, mostly women, are better educated, have more disposable income, and are buying with more sophistication than ever."

Table of Contents
1. The Bifurcating Market
2. The New Middle-ClassConsumer
3. Cheap is Good
4. Spanning the Poles
5. All Treasure, All the Time
6. When the Calculus Shifts
7. In A Pickle
8. Nickels and Dimes
9. Left in the Dust
10. Taking Action

[OmnivoreInk]

Contingency Planning and Disaster Recovery: A Small Business Guide
Donna R. Childs, Stefan Dietrich
2002

"Among the countless tragic lessons of 9/11, an overlooked but important discovery was the lack of preparedness among small and midsized businesses for responding to disaster. While most of the media attention was naturally devoted to...., the very existence of thousands of small businesses was determined by whether or not they had adequate insurance, sufficient technological support, and viable disaster contingency plans."

(People who live in hurricane prone areas need this as well...and who knows when a fire might not strike...)

Table of Contents
1. Preparation
2. Response
3. Recovery
4. SAmple IT Solutions
Basic safety practices

Okay, the TOC isn't too helpful, but there's lots of valuable info in this book, as to ensure that your losses won't be catastrophic. How people cope with suddenly seeing their homes and all their possessions gone, what kinds of insurance to get, etc. etc.

[OmnivoreInk]

She Wins, You Win: The Most Important Rules Every Businesswoman Needs to Know
Gail Evans, 2003
Also author of Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman

Inside jacket:
Every time a woman succeeds in business, every other woman's chances of succeeding in business increase. Every time a woman fails in business, every other woman's chances of failure increases.

Gail realized that one of the most important elements of the men's game, which was missing from the women's, was support: The boys know how to take care of one another. In order to create lasting success, women need to help one another and band together as a team.

TOC
The Woman's Team
Why you must play on the woman's team
How to join the team

Tips for the team
1. Be a mentor
2. Rainmake
3. Uncover and share information
4. Keep quiet
5. Unite with all women at all times
6. Make team-related choices
7. Weave a female web

Challenges of the Team
Twelve team members to watch out for
The eleven most common team questions (and answers)

Conclusions
Acknowledgements



My own view
Haven't read this yet, but it seems like she's advocating an "Us against them" mentality. Neverthless, networking with fellow women - and men! - only makes good sense.

[OmnivoreInk]

Why do I include this in a list of books aimed at female entrepreneurs? Well...in the expectation that there are as many female history buffs as male ones, and in the belief that anyone interested in history will find this book fascinating, while those interested in project management will learn a thing or two.

I think this was the first "gimmick" book - an author using a historical figure (usually a male, military figure, it must be admitted) to talk about modern day business management. I refuse to read any of the kind that advocates - even obliquely - the techniques of the Sopranos or the Mossad - but these military ones are pretty fun.

Anyway:

Only in the understanding of history, Napoleon might say, do we gain an understanding of strategy in the present. In the same spirit, Napoleon on Project Management offers the recipe for successfully managing your commitments using the strategies, tactics and priorities that propelled Napoleon himself to victory. [The book doesn't gloss over how Napolean eventually fell in defeat, of course, and there's lessons to be learned there as well.

TOC
Foreword by Douglas James Allan (Napoleanic Society of America)
1. The Rise to Power
-The Skills to Succeed
-A Compelling Vision
-Diplomacy and Networking
-Lessons from the Great Campaigns

2. Napoleon's 6 Winning Principles
-Introduction
-Exactitude
-Speed
-Flexibility
-Simplicity
-Character
-Moral Force

3. The Downfall
-What Went Wrong
-Lessons from the Russian Invasion and Waterloo
-The Four Critical Warning Signs
-Napoleon's Legacy

[OmnivoreInk]

Book: Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead But Gutsy Girls Do: Nine Secrets every career woman must know
Kate White
1995

Foy years Kate White lived as a good girl - a rule follower, a people pleaser, a busy beaver - until she was passed over for the job of editor-in-chief of a magazine she had been running for months. She finally realized that being gutsy, not good, was the only way to succeed.

A gutsy girl :
1. Breaks the rules
2. Has one clear goal for the future
3. Does only what's essential
4. Doesn't worry whether people like her
5. Walks and talks like a winner
6. Asks for what she wants
7. Faces trouble head on
8. Trusts her instincts
9. Takes smart risks

This book has NO table of contents, but above are the chapter headings.

A good book, although I really wish they'd stop talking about "girls" and start talking about women.

[OmnivoreInk]

Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years

Monica Samuels and J. C. Conklin
2006

Jacket:
Millions of educated, professional women are quitting their jobs to stay home and raise their children. That would never be you, right? You worked hard for your degree and even harder to get to this point in your career. Quitting now, even for a few years, would kill your career, right?

That's what Monica Samuels thought when she found out she was pregnant...

Over 60 percent of professional women who leave work to raise children want to get back into the workforce someday. If you even think you might want to go back to work, be it in one year or twenty, you need to lay the groundwork now for a successful reentry or your options will be limited.

1. Quitting: When is the best time to cut the cord
2. Feathering the nest: How to financially prepare before you quit
3. Departure strategies: leaving the office
4. Money and Power: Constructing a new life on the home front
5. Backlash: handling family, friends and angry strangers
6. One foot in, one foot out: How can they miss you if you don't really go away?
7. Part time: It ain't perfect, but it's doable
8. Going back: the when and how of returning to work full time
9. Career counseling: When you need a change
10. Entrepreneurs: True Stories
Resources
Index

[OmnivoreInk]

Book:The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth
Robert G. Allen (co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul)
2002

Jacket:
Is it possible to make a million dollars in only one minute? The answer just might surprise you. [This book] is an entirely new approach, a life changing "millionaire system" that will teach you how to:

1. Create wealth even when you have little or nothing to start with
2. Use the power of leverage to build wealth rapidly
3. Overcome fears so you can take reasonable risks
Use "one minute" habits to build wealth over the long term

...Here are two books in one, fiction and non-fiction, designed to address two kinds of learning so you can fully integrate these life-changing lessons. On the right-hand side pages you will find the fictional story of a woman who has to make a million dollars in ninety days or lose her two children forever. The left-hand pages give the practical, step-by-step non-fiction strategies and techniques that actually work in the real world.