Building a StoryBrand and other new business books

Below are comments about several new business books:
BUILDING A STORYBRAND by Donald Miller is the number one selling hardcover business book according to the charts in today's Wall Street Journal. Its subtitle is "Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen"and it begins with tons of testimonials from practitioners and small business owners who are amazed at its effectiveness. I am curious to see if these principles can translate to other entities like our school library or our school district when voters are deciding on funding levels. Miller advocates using the StoryBrand7 Framework, refining your website to be clear and compelling and executing the StoryBrand Marketing Blueprint's five tasks (create a one-liner for your company; create email addresses using a lead generator; create an automated email drip campaign; collect and tell stories of transformation; create a referral generating campaign).  I wondered about the emphasis on emails, but Miller says a 20% open rate is industry standard. It's an interesting take on a marketing plan and should pair nicely with Simon Sinek's START WITH WHY.

My favorite of the titles listed here, REAL IMPACT is written by Morgan Simon who has an impressive background in finance and social justice. She serves on several advisory boards and is an adjunct professor at Middlebury.  Here, she extols the possibilities for impact investing -- that is, the trillion dollar trend of investing both for profit and for social benefit. As an activist, she writes not only about good intentions involved, but also about the flaws in the current system (e.g., free market plus charity, microfinance, fair trade efforts). Then, Simon proposes a new, transformative model (based on principles like "engage communities in design, governance, and ownership," "add more value than you extract," and "fairly balance risk and return between investors, entrepreneurs, and communities") and provides stories of specific impact investment projects. She addresses her comments to portfolio managers and to the general public interested in using their money to do good, inviting readers to use REAL IMPACT as "an opportunity to reflect deeply on what having real impact can mean to your work." Including her own experiences and emphasizing the importance of community level research makes this an engaging, appealing read, especially to young people interested in the field.

INVESTING WITH IMPACT is by Jeremy Balkin, another expert in this field - see his TedTalk here.

Finally, THE STARTUP WAY is by Eric Ries, an entrepreneur, author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, and consultant to a range of businesses, including GE. This longer, 400 page text emphasizes the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset and ways that the modern company can transform itself to embrace entrepreneurial thought and actions. After providing some historical perspective, Ries outlines "a management system for innovations at scale." More information and excerpts are available at his website.

We are in the process of identifying some possible titles for our business students to read as part of an independent assignment.  If you have some to recommend, please let us know.