Being a Billionaire is a very interesting thing....But what about a Zillionaire too...Lets check that out too... #Smiles...
Who wants to be a billionaire? We may not all get there but we sure
can dream. More importantly we can learn from some of the great minds
who have achieved such great success. Below we have compiled 10 books
written about, and a few by, some of the most notable business men and
women of our time. You can’t go wrong picking a book from this list.
Leave a comment with any we may have missed.
1. Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way
“Oh, screw it, let’s do it.”
That’s the philosophy that has
allowed Richard Branson, in slightly more than twenty-five years, to
spawn so many successful ventures. From the airline business (Virgin
Atlantic Airways), to music (Virgin Records and V2), to cola (Virgin
Cola), to retail (Virgin Megastores), and nearly a hundred others,
ranging from financial services to bridal wear, Branson has a track
record second to none.
Losing My Virginity is the
unusual, frequently outrageous autobiography of one of the great
business geniuses of our time. When Richard Branson started his first
business, he and his friends decided that “since we’re complete virgins
at business, let’s call it just that: Virgin.” Since then, Branson has
written his own “rules” for success, creating a group of companies with a
global presence, but no central headquarters, no management hierarchy,
and minimal bureaucracy.
Many of Richard Branson’s companies—airlines, retailing, and cola are
good examples—were started in the face of entrenched competition. The
experts said, “Don’t do it.” But Branson found golden opportunities in
markets in which customers have been ripped off or underserved, where
confusion reigns, and the competition is complacent.
And in this stressed-out, overworked age, Richard Branson gives us a new
model: a dynamic, hardworking, successful entrepreneur who lives life
to the fullest. Family, friends, fun, and adventure are equally
important as business in Branson’s life. Losing My Virginity is a
portrait of a productive, sane, balanced life, filled with rich and
colorful stories.
2. Steve Jobs
Based
on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as
well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends,
adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a
riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense
personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and
ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers,
animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital
publishing.
At a time when America is
seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around
the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the
ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the
best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect
creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the
imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
3. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
You
want to learn about the path that we took at Zappos to get to over $1
billion in gross merchandise sales in less than ten years.
You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way.
You want to learn from all the
mistakes we made at Zappos over the years so that your business can
avoid making some of the same ones.
You want to figure out the right balance of profits, passion, and purpose in business and in life.
You want to build a long-term, enduring business and brand.
You want to create a stronger
company culture, which will make your employees and coworkers happier
and create more employee engagement, leading to higher productivity.
You want to deliver a better
customer experience, which will make your customers happier and create
more customer loyalty, leading to increased profits.
4. The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
Eduardo
Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best
friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and
long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a
geeky awkwardness with women.
Eduardo figured their ticket to
social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of
the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that
had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked
on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an
interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a
computer genius of the first order.
Which he used to find a more
direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the
university’s computer system, creating a ratable database of all the
female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university’s
servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment,
in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.
What followed–a real-life
adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and
six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the
most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long,
Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their
relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare.
The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to
the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while
Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore
two best friends apart.
You want to build something special.
5. The Mary Kay Way: Timeless Principles from America’s Greatest Woman Entrepreneur
Mary
Kay Ash built a global independent sales force that today numbers 1.8
million women, and is respected by business and academic leaders. How?
The secret is in this book.
For forty-five years, the
principles in The Mary Kay Way have helped the company succeed through
changing economic times and explosive global growth. It has been said
that no company wholeheartedly embodies the values and reflects the
beliefs of its founder more than Mary Kay Inc. Now you can put the same
inspiring principles to work for you.
Recognized today as America’s
greatest woman entrepreneur, Mary Kay Ash stepped out in 1963 in a man’s
world to blaze a new path for women. She grew her business based not on
the rules of competition, but on The Golden Rule. By “praising people
to success” and “sandwiching every bit of criticism between two heavy
layers of praise,” this energetic Texas titan opened new opportunities
for women around the world and built a multibillion-dollar corporation.
Mary Kay’s unconventional
business philosophy was first published in 1984. Now revised and updated
for the first time, with examples from her company’s top independent
salespeople, The Mary Kay Way is perhaps her most important legacy.
6. Sam Walton: Made in America : My Story
Meet
a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America’s
heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single dime store in a
hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the
world. The undisputed merchant king of the late twentieth century, Sam
never lost the common touch. Here, finally, inimitable
words. Genuinely modest, but always sure if his ambitions and
achievements. Sam shares his thinking in a candid,
straight-from-the-shoulder style.
In a story rich with anecdotes
and the “rules of the road” of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam
Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled
him to lasso the American Dream.
The national bestseller that tells the fascinating life story and
unique business philosophy of billionaire Sam Walton, founder of
Wal-Mart. Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth
of America’s heartland, who parlayed a single dime-store in a
hardscrabble cotton town into the largest retailer in the world.
7. Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
Since
1987, Starbucks’s star has been on the rise, growing from 11 Seattle,
WA-based stores to more than 1,000 worldwide. Its goals grew, too, from
the more modest, albeit fundamental one of offering high-quality coffee
beans roasted to perfection to, more recently, opening a new store
somewhere
every day. An exemplary success story, Starbucks is identified with
innovative marketing strategies, employee-ownership programs, and a
product that’s become a subculture.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a manager, a marketer, or a curious Starbucks loyalist,
Pour Your Heart into It
will let you in on the revolutionary Starbucks venture. CEO Howard
Schultz recounts the company’s rise in 24 chapters, each of which
illustrates such core values as “Winning at the expense of employees is
not victory at all.”
8. One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
Amazon’s
business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and
convenient that customers won’t think twice. It can almost be summed up
by the button on every page: “Buy now with one click.”
Why has Amazon been so
successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder,
whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have
driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.
Richard Brandt charts Bezos’s
rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can
be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business
sense. Brandt explains:
- Why Bezos decided to allow negative product reviews, correctly
guessing that the earned trust would outweigh possible lost sales.
- Why Amazon zealously guards some patents yet freely shares others.
- Why Bezos called becoming profitable the “dumbest” thing they could do in 1997.
- How Amazon.com became one of the only dotcoms to survive the bust of the early 2000s.
- Where the company is headed next.
9. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Here
is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected
men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never
written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder,
unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest
to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom.
The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man
known everywhere as “The Oracle of Omaha.”
Although the media track him
constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full life story. His
reality is private, especially by celebrity standards. Indeed, while the
homespun persona that the public sees is true as far as it goes, it
goes only so far. Warren Buffett is an array of paradoxes. He set out to
prove that nice guys can finish first. Over the years he treated his
investors as partners, acted as their steward, and championed honesty as
an investor, CEO, board member, essayist, and speaker. At the same time
he became the world’s richest man, all from the modest Omaha
headquarters of his company Berkshire Hathaway. None of this fits the
term “simple.”
10. Oprah: A Biography
For
the past twenty-five years, no one has been better at revealing secrets
than Oprah Winfrey. On what is arguably the most influential show in
television history, she has gotten her guests—often the biggest
celebrities in the world—to bare their love lives, explore their painful
pasts, admit their transgressions, reveal their pleasures, and explore
their demons. In turn, Oprah has repeatedly allowed her audience to
share in her own life story, opening up about the sexual abuse in her
past and discussing her romantic relationships, her weight problems, her
spiritual beliefs, her charitable donations, and her strongly held
views on the state of the world.
After a quarter of a century of the Oprah-ization of America, can there be any more secrets left to reveal?
There is a case to be made, and it is certainly made in this book,
that Oprah Winfrey is an important, and even great, figure of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But there is also a case to be
made that even greatness needs to be examined and put under a
microscope. Fact must be separated from myth, truth from hype. Kitty
Kelley has made that separation, showing both sides of Oprah as they
have never been shown before. In doing so she has written a
psychologically perceptive and meticulously researched book that will
surprise and thrill everyone who reads it.
Becoming a billionaire seems like a great goal, but unfortunately it's
only a dream for most of us. The thing is, many billionaires didn't
start out as such. Some certainly had economic and educational
advantages, but even without those, their smart decisions and business
choices, plus a few characteristics that can't be overlooked, led them
from Point A to Point B (Billionaire). So, what can we learn about our
own real-life options for becoming billionaires? (More than 70 years
after his death, this man remains one of the great figures of Wall
Street. See J.D. Rockefeller: From Oil Baron To Billionaire.)
First things first: find a way to make money. Four of the most
oft-methods of money making in the world of billionaires are inventing,
investing, innovating and being an entrepreneur, but remember that how you pursue your billions is just as important as what you do to get them. 
