Disciplined Entrepreneurship, 2nd Edition

PREFACE

OVER 15 YEARS AGO, when I was asked to lead a core entrepreneurship course at MIT, I looked for a book that taught the basics of entrepreneurship that I had learned the hard way in over two decades as an entrepreneur in startups as well as a large organization. I was confident that there was a book out there that was rigorous, actionable, and accessible.

Turned out I was wrong. There was no such book.

Many of the books I came back to were excellent and had great material I had found helpful along my journey to entrepreneurship enlightenment, including Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy, Stefan Thomke's Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah's Inbound Marketing, Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany, Eric Ries's Lean Startup, Ash Maurya's Running Lean, Marc Randolph's That Will Never Work, and Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur's Business Model Generation. More recently, the books have gotten more comprehensive, like Zero to IPO by Frederic Kerrest and See, Solve, Scale by Danny Warshay. These are all great books that truly advance the field of entrepreneurship, and I will reference many of them in this book. I believe that each book, along with other material I've collected over the years (like the concepts of Design Thinking, Jobs To Be Done, Simon Sinek's talks, and lessons from IBM as well as Procter & Gamble, to name but a few more), provide valuable ...