4 Top Books on Operations and Thoughts on Them

Operations - deeply practical project management. How to apply the PMI project management processes in the simplest and most practical way, with a professional example. The PMI is the oldest global institute for effectively running projects. It has completely changed the way that I communicate with people and is the most clear tool around today for increasing the likelihood that your ideas will be profitable and easy to manage.

Who Not How - Procrastination is wisdom. If you're not doing it, you're not meant to do it. Either someone else is meant to do it or it simply doesn't need to get done. For example, if you're not excited about writing emails, hire someone else to do it. If you're not excited about lifting weights, don't lift weights; this doesn't mean that you shouldn't work out, but maybe dancing or hiking makes you more excited and you should do that instead. This also frees the mind to work on Joint Ventures - if you're not doing it in your business and you can't afford the expense to delegate, you shouldn't slave away to do it, you should create a joint venture with someone who is great at it. This power then allows you to realize that joint venture deals need to be REALLY BIG in order to make sense, which expands your mind further in the process ;)

Seven Figure Agency - Definitely one of the most fundamental books I've ever read. It's geared towards agencies (obviously) so ecom owners should read it with a grain of salt. That said, this is where the rule of five ones comes from. Before this book, I had never read any book that laid out the steps needed to hit your heights. We come across all these great ideas and we know we need them...but when? Each traffic source can produce $1M in revenue with one offer and one demographic. This is the foundation of the Flower method. It also gives a good org chart for minimal hirees to fully automate and grow a company.

Critical Chain - A good fiction story that illustrates the difficult concept of Critical Chain over Critical Path. In a nutshell, a critical path is the sequence of stages determining the minimum time needed for an operation. This principle is detailed in the Udemy course above, but this book shows how, in a critical path, that you give every step ample time to get done, which leads to the fulfillment of Parkinson's Law - that an operation will take the amount of time allotted. This is more true for less important tasks, and less so for more important tasks that will inevitably go LONGER. Critical chain shares the logic that less important actions should be given less time, but they should still be allotted buffer time that gets shifted to other parts of the CHAIN when needed.