The CEO Library Community: our first newsletter!
The text below was sent in September 2017 to our newsletter subscribers. If you enjoy it and want more, subscribe here.
Hello there, fellow book worms!
Cristina here. First of all, I wanna thank you again for believing in us and subscribing to our newsletter. This is actually the first one we’re sending out, so I’m a little bit nervous. 🙂
We put a lot of thought into what to include, even analyzed what other book related newsletters are doing, but finally just decided to not let ourselves be influenced and do our own thing. Create the newsletter that we’d love to read and forward to our friends!
What to expect (I know that you already received an email from us with all these, but it’s just a quick recap of the main sections):
1. Book recommendations. These will be personally selected by us from the ones recently added on the website, so it’s nothing automated. We’ll try to cover as many categories as possible, to make this section diverse.
2. Interviews with successful people, folks we admire and are considered to be among the best in their field. We wanted to know what books influenced their career, what they learned from them, how they applied that knowledge, but also their reading habits.
3. Collections. These are lists of books on different themes that might concern you. For example, if you’ll ever want to improve your strategy skills, you’ll have a collection with books that will help you do that. Well, right now we only have two, and none of those is about strategy skills 🙂 but, as the site grows bigger (and so does our list of recommended books), we’ll create more of these.
So here we go:
“Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s memoir about creating Nike, is a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. In fact, the only thing that seems inevitable in page after page of Knight’s story is that his company will end in failure.”
This is what Bill Gates wrote on his blog after reading “Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike“.
If you only read one biography this year, this should be it. It’s Phil Knight’s story of how he built and shaped Nike. His memories go back to 1962, when he was just a young boy, lost and with now clue what to do with his life. The book ends in the ‘80s, right when Nike became a Gargantuan company (perhaps there will be a second part?).
It was written with J. B. Moehringer’s help, the ghostwriter who also helped Andre Agassi write Open (another highly recommended autobiography).
Why read it? To see how much of a success story is composed of luck, grit, having a safety net, political context, taking advantage of opportunities and meeting the right people at the right time. Lots of ingredients that need to align!
Since we launched our project we had lots of great interviews that we’re really proud of. We had the chance to talk to:
- Vladimir Oane, founder of UberVu start-up, one of the first all-in-one social media services, that was acquired in 2014 by Hootsuite; former marketing manager at CaptainGO, an online hotel booking service, and CEO and founder of Metromind, a marketing agency.
- Bogdan Iordache, co-founder of How to Web (one of the leading tech conferences in South-Eastern Europe), founder of TechHub Bucharest (biggest co-working space for Romanian entrepreneurs) and manager of MVP Academy.
- Bogdana Butnar, currently Head of Strategy at Poke (London based digital agency, part of Nurun group); before this she was Industry Manager at Google, Managing Director of MRM Worldwide – one of Romania’s top digital agencies, and Chief Strategic Planner at McCann Erickson and Headvertising.
- Dragoș Novac, serial entrepreneur, manager of Nordic9, the Crunchbase for Scandinavia; founder of FourHooks digital consultancy agency, and also building an AI-based solution for tennis players.
- David Sisk, owner of David Sisk Fitness, a boutique gym he founded in Cork, Ireland, but also involved with the Wave Retreats and exclusive distributor in Ireland for Bia Brazil sports clothing line.
We’re really glad that they accepted our interview requests and shared with us lots of valuable information. Depending on their professional field, you’ll see different books that they recommend and had an impact on them.
I’ll just let you dig in and find out for yourself (just click on their names and a new tab will open with the interview).
As I was saying before, we currently have only two collections of books:
- Biographies that will show you the struggles of world’s biggest entrepreneurs: Elon Musk admitted that he enjoys reading biographies and considers that they helped him succeed. Here’s a list of biographies recommended by entrepreneurs.
- Books that will help entrepreneurs be more productive: If you’re looking for ways to manage your time more efficiently and regain control over your professional life, here are some books that you can start with. Don’t expect them to be a magic wand that will do the work for you, but they will help you set some healthy systems in place.
Last but not least, I think you’ll enjoy reading Bobby’s article about how The CEO Library was born, the story behind how and why we created the project (I’ll write one as well, probably next week, as we have different perspectives / notice different things).
That’s it for now. Of course, there will be a lot of future fine tuning, depending on the feedback we receive from you. We’re counting on that in order to improve these mails, so please feel free to reply and let us know what you liked most, what you’re not so fond of, or any other ideas that you have – no matter how crazy they are.
Thanks!
Until next week.
Cristina & Bobby,
The CEO Library founders
The text above was sent in September 2017 to our newsletter subscribers. If you enjoyed it, subscribe here.
