The books that shaped my llfe

Every issue we ask a prominent businessman about the books that made them who they are today.

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Both this and the sequel, The Long Road Back, made a huge impression on me when I was at school. It really brought home the horrors of war, something you read about in commando comics and see in the papers, all nicely cut and dried. Journalistic writing is that of an observer—on TV, war becomes a spectator sport. But these books really got under the skin of the people involved.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
I read it in Grade 10 and it helped me understand what injustice was, this problem of being a minority. These are situations you face in India, especially now. Just look at this issue of terror. Muslims are always saying they’re prejudiced against, but we always try to be as neutral as possible with these things. This book put me in the oppressed person’s shoes. It broadened my horizons and impacted my sense of fairness and justice.

Built to Last, Jim Collins
It shows that one of the common traits of great companies is that they all start with a period of pottering around, not clear what they want to be. But then the fog lifts, you figure out what you want and you chase it relentlessly. It’s what happened to us—we had seven years of pottering before we launched our job site. There’s an enormous value in drifting in the initial years. The sequel, Good to Great, covers similar terrain.

The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki
It’s a book on entrepreneurship, everything you need to know to start up—how to pitch for funds, how to do a presentation. I read it only later, but it articulated a lot of stuff that I knew intuitively. Like—you’ll be more successful if you're working for meaning and not money.

Dilbert, Scott Adams
I love Dilbert. He captures exactly how stupid organisations can be. For the last three years, we gave out a Dilbert calendar to our clients and they loved it. I personally selected the cartoons that went in.

Google
It’s one thing to put up a snazzy website, complete with flash intros and drop-down navigation tabs. But if no one can find it, it’d be like setting up shop behind a brick wall. Successful websites are those that Google ranks on page one when people search under the right keywords. It’s all about being found by the big search engines. And there’s no bigger search engine than Google.

Jon Smith was part of the founding team of Amazon.co.uk. In this pocket size manual, crammed with information, he rattles through 52 ideas for fledgling websites to climb up the search rankings on a Google page. There are the obvious pointers—research which keywords are popular, make sure you repeat them in your pages, your picture file names, the title of your business etc. Smith provides numerous practical sites to help you problem solve and monitor your progress. But then there’s the stuff you wouldn’t think of—the importance of H (header) tags and keyword density, for instance, when it comes to attracting the attention of the Googlebot, the search engine spider that decides where in the Google rankings you deserve to be.

A must-buy if you’re serious about online business.