Books. You can learn a lot through them. Through books, you become aware of events that took place years before you were born. With books you become experts in fields where you are either a nonentity or a neophyte.
With books, you become filled with knowledge, wisdom and understanding. When you are empowered with knowledge gotten from books, you walk tall among your peers; you earn respect, local and international.
The Grameen Foundation has a good list of books on small business management you will find useful. Below are the books and statements on them by their reviewers:
The Poor Always Pay Back by Asif Dowla tells the story of how Grameen Bank, one of the world’s oldest and most successful microfinance institutions — and the inspiration for Grameen Foundation — transformed itself into “Grameen II,” to better serve the poorest of the poor.
A Billion Bootstraps by Philip Smith and Eric Thurman shows the power of microfinance to change lives by enabling impoverished people to start small businesses, support their families, and improve local economies. By applying investment principles to philanthropy, it finds that microfinance provides a much better “return on investment” than traditional aid to the poor.
Transforming Lives $40 at A Time by Dana Whitaker explores the lives of microfinance clients in 13 countries through personal stories and photography.
More Pathways out of Poverty, edited by Sam Daley-Harris and Anna Awimbo, explores new practices in microfinance, some of them revolutionary, and draws on the success of the industry to illustrate the challenges involved in lifting clients out of poverty. In the second chapter of the book, a paper by Grameen Foundation president Alex Counts, Kashf Foundation president Roshaneh Zafar, and Grameen Foundation programme officer Erin Connor, examines factors supporting the exponential growthof microfinance institutions.’
Be Super Rich: How to Make Real Money in the Real World by Joe C. David, author of best-selling Be Your Own Boss, is the aftermath of the author’s various speaking sessions in several seminars, conventions, conferences and business seminars in recent times. The teachings in the book are practical, down-to-earth spiced with case studies that identify with our local environment. The book tells you the first step in creating wealth is to set a specific goal and visualize it as a reality; every human being has his rules and if you don’t play according to the rules of the game, you stand the chance of being disqualified; every human being is constantly looking for solutions or answers to whatsoever is threatening him or making him uncomfortable.
151 Small Businesses for Entrepreneurs by Wale Akinyanmi is a glossary of small businesses start-ups can invest in.
What’s in Your Hands by Charles Ntuko is a unique how to do it book for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Have you read any of these business books? Share your thoughts…
