Ogilvy on Advertising

Advice to Founders and CEOs - Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary) Finance - Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... (https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting]%28https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting%29) - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight) Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting) - The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham) Legal - Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy) Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit) - Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore)…

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. People hoot and holler over Don Draper, but Ogilvy is the real deal.

Ogilvy on Advertising is one of my absolute favorites, and I go back to it regularly. It's also a beautiful book with lots of large photos of campaigns. It's not specifically "marketing" of course, but it covers that area, as well. The funny thing is that a lot of folks in the business writing books today like to present themselves as being innovators and mavericks going against the "old school" of advertising and marketing...but Ogilvy covers a lot of the "new" techniques that folks like Godin and Ries and many others in the web era are pushing. Stuff like directly talking to your customer; the power of personal messages, for example, is covered in great detail in Ogilvy's book. Sure, the technology wasn't there yet to tweet and blog, but the ideas translate quite clearly and easily if you just think about it for a minute. Another "old timer" (who also considered himself a maverick fighting the Ogilvy ways) is George Lois. His book "What's the Big Idea?" is full of great stories of reaching a market on the cheap.