I’m occasionally asked, as a business owner and known book nerd, if there are any specific books that I’d recommend to an aspiring entrepreneur. I’m happy to say that there are!

The following books, in my judgment, offer the most bang for the buck as far as not just theory, but especially practical advice and readability. Because time is our most precious commodity, each one is relatively short, and all of the following are available as audiobooks as well:

• The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael E. Gerber — In exploring the Entrepreneur (E-)Myth, Gerber seeks to investigate “why most small businesses don’t work, and what to do about it.” This is a classic of the entrepreneur genre, and its solid advice hasn’t aged a bit. Required reading for those considering their own startup.
• The Art of the Start, by Guy Kawasaki — Billed as “the time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything,” Kawasaki delivers the goods. Each section offers a solid entry-level overview on all of the many, varied aspects of running a new business.
• The Myths of Innovation, by Scott Berkun — When starting something new, we have a tendency to overvalue the importance of genius and originality at the expense of simple dedication and hard work. While not entirely about how to start a new business, Berkun’s marvelous book is packed with practical insights for any would-be entrepreneur, and will get you in the right frame of mind for the exciting journey ahead.

Those three books should be enough to get any new business owner inspired about their enterprise, with a knowledge of which pitfalls to avoid and a head full of practical advice. For additional reading, consider the following supplemental books:

• Built to Last, by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras — In a stunning project, two professors from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business exhaustively researched 18 visionary companies and identified their common characteristics. Some of the examples haven’t aged very well, due to management choices since the book’s publication, but the lessons are well worth understanding. (I found Collins’s follow-up, Good to Great, to be engaging but inferior.)
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini — Being in business doesn’t just mean working and playing well with others—it also involves endless amounts of trying to get people to go along with your plans. Cialdini’s book remains a classic for executives, salespeople, and anyone who wants to make their vision a reality.
• Getting Things Done, by David Allen — A new business owner is going to discover almost immediately that there isn’t enough time in the day to accomplish everything that needs to be done. David Allen’s no-frills, bottom-up approach can help revolutionize your productivity with a simple, practical, stress-free method for Getting Things Done.
• The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss — Building on the earlier works of Gerber and Allen (listed above), Ferriss offers tons of practical tips for designing the entrepreneurial lifestyle that will allow you to most enjoy your life. This book is very strongly recommended if your new business is involved in online sales, as it includes a detailed blueprint for a self-managing e-commerce enterprise.

Do you have an opinion on any of the books I’ve listed? Do you have any favorites that aren’t included here? Let me know!

Back in the Stone Age of the Internet—the mid/late 1990’s—a company called Netscape announced their intention to render the operating system (OS) obsolete. The OS was an architectural relic, Netscape argued, from a time before the Web gave us a platform that was independent of its underlying hardware.

As it turned out, Netscape’s promises turned out to be grander than their ability to deliver the technology. Meanwhile, their announcement had the effect of tapping the tiger on the nose; Microsoft mobilized, and a titanic battle ensued that came to be known as the browser wars. It ended when the Department of Justice intervened on a previously unseen scale, but not before Netscape was essentially reduced to a smoldering hole in the ground.

Now Google has announced that their open source Web browser, Chrome, will form the basis of a new web-based OS to be released in the second half of 2010. TechCrunch, never known to shy away from hyperbole, says that Google has dropped a nuclear bomb on Microsoft:

But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, “However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” Yeah, who do you think they mean by that? [...]

Google notes that any app developed for Google Chrome OS will work in any standards-compliant browser on any OS.

What Google is doing is not recreating a new kind of OS, they’re creating the best way to not need one at all. [...]

A lot of people are still wary about running web apps for when their computer isn’t connected to the web. But HTML 5 has the potential to change that, as you’ll be able to work in the browser even when not connected, and upload when you are again.

As that last paragraph implies, the main difference between Google’s effort, and Netscape’s a decade ago, is that the state of the art is now significantly more advanced. The technology of the web-based thin client has finally caught up to its promises. And Google, as a company, is both significantly more mature and well-financed than was Netscape.

This latest iteration of the browser wars should be interesting…

Sys-admins throughout Puget Sound had their long weekend disrupted on Friday when a fire at Fisher Plaza shut down power to their mission-critical data center. Thousands of websites were knocked offline, including the transaction processor Authorize.Net, the heavily-visited Microsoft Bing Travel, and AdHost, themselves a shared hosting provider for thousands more business and personal websites (here’s a partial list of affected websites).

As it happens, this wasn’t the first such outage at Fisher Plaza, where data service was also interrupted last year due to a similar electrical fire. Michael Young, CTO of real estate listings site Redfin, deserves kudos for recognizing the point of failure and instituting a disaster recovery plan. As he explained to TechFlash:

We were pretty embarrassed last June when Adhost had a similar electrical fire and took our site down for 8 hours (well into our core business hours) with brown-outs a day or two after that had us scrambling. ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ resonated in our brains.

So by October 2008, we basically instituted a disaster avoidance plan where we had redundant-everything for our mission-critical databases, servers and networks in separate buildings.

When the problem happened last night, our beepers went off, we saw what looked like a major outage in one building, and were able to switch to the redundant systems.

Well done, Redfin!

This also seems like a good opportunity to put in a plug for Dreamhost, my own current hosting provider, with whom I’ve never had any day-long (or even half-day-long) outages, fire-related or otherwise. And remember: wherever you do your web hosting, a disaster recovery plan is a necessity, not a luxury.