Shortform Books

If you’ve ever taken Tylenol for a headache or powdered a baby’s bottom with Johnson’s Baby Powder, journalist Gardiner Harris has some bad news for you. In his book No More Tears (2025), he exposes how pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) knowingly deceived its customers over decades, causing them to rely on unsafe or actively harmful products. Harris uses internal J&J company records, l…

What are the Good-to-Great companies featured in Jim Collins’s book Good to Great? How did they qualify to be “good to great”? What can you learn from them? Over five years, Collins’s team of 21 researchers reviewed close to 6,000 articles and generated over 2,000 pages of interview transcripts to determine whether and how companies can go from good to great. We’ll cover the good-to-great compani…

The EOS management system is a holistic business management model created by entrepreneurial expert and business consultant Gino Wickman. The EOS management system builds or strengthens six key business components that the author discovered while turning around his family’s company. To avoid or overcome the challenges holding your business back, Wickman writes that you must follow six key steps. …

What separates restaurants that thrive for decades from those that close within a year? Restaurateur Danny Meyer argues the answer lies in what he calls “enlightened hospitality”—a philosophy that puts people first. In Setting the Table, Meyer shares how this approach transformed him from a young salesman into the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group. This guide breaks down Meyer’s journey a…

In Good to Great, former Stanford business professor Jim Collins offers a primer on turning the average into the exceptional. Through detailed case studies of 11 companies that went from tracking the market to exceeding it by at least 3x, Collins presents the key factors that separate merely good organizations from great ones—from rare leadership to disciplined thinking to the dogged pursuit of a…

What are “Level 5” leaders? How do you become one? Level 5 leadership is a principle behind “good-to-great” companies that are led by “Level 5” leaders. These leaders are personally humble but professionally driven executives, and they make the best leaders of companies. Level 5 leadership is a rare type that can help your business soar. We’ll cover what Jim Collins’s Level 5 leadership concept i…

How can creating a business scorecard help you monitor performance and stay on track towards your business objectives? Most companies rely instead on a P&L statement, but by the time you get it, problems have already occurred. A business scorecard offers organizations a snapshot of their current performance as benchmarked against their goals. With the business scorecard, you can see where you are…

How do you build a successful business when the direction isn’t fully clear yet? Start by putting the right people on the team first. Research on great companies shows that who you hire matters more than which strategy you choose at the outset. In Good to Great, Jim Collins explains why assembling the right team lays the groundwork for building a successful business. Below, you’ll learn how stron…

Do you struggle to streamline your business processes? How can you introduce structure into your processes so that they run smoothly without your constant oversight? Your company has a few key processes that keep it running—together, they constitute your unique “way” of doing business. To keep it running smoothly, you need to streamline your business processes in a systematic way. Keep reading to…

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle is a concept from his book Start with Why. The Golden Circle visualizes the structure of an organization and looks like a bullseye target with three rings. The bullseye at the center is the WHY, the next ring out is the HOW, and the largest ring is the WHAT. When making decisions or communicating, you begin at the center with the WHY, then migrate out to the HOW, then …

How do you identify workplace issues? What can you do to root them out before they escalate and compromise your key business functions? Many leadership teams talk endlessly about problems without solving them. But unresolved workplace issues or problems drain your company’s energy. In Traction, Gino Wickman says that successful businesses also need a consistent way to identify and solve problems.…

Simon Sinek’s leadership views center around establishing trust. Sinek believes good leadership creates trust within the business, and how to establish the trust necessary to be a great leader. Trust is a gut feeling—it exists in the limbic brain and can’t be rationalized. That’s why we trust certain companies even when things go wrong, and mistrust other companies even though they do everything …

How can defining your target market help you reach your ideal customer? A target market is a specific, defined segment of people whom a company targets with its marketing efforts. In other words, defining your target market means identifying your ideal customer—the people who have an affinity for the products or services you offer. Here is how defining your target market can help you propel your …

What is Jim Collins’s “hedgehog concept”? A hedgehog concept is a simple concept in response to the complex facts of reality. The principle was introduced by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great, in which he argues that truly great companies are oriented around a hedgehog concept. If you think thinking like a hedgehog can help your company in the long run, we have a breakdown of Collins’s advice…

What if the key to thriving in our unequal, unstable world lies in the tactics of 18th-century pirates? Entrepreneur Sam Conniff’s book Be More Pirate reveals how these outcasts built wildly successful crews by rejecting the rules of their corrupt, unstable world—and argues you can do the same today. This guide breaks down the strategies that made Golden Age pirates legendary, from their disrupti…

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping industries, and many fear that sales professionals are becoming obsolete. But, in The AI Edge, Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino argue the opposite: AI isn’t a replacement for human talent; it’s a powerful catalyst for those who know how to use it. Their core thesis is that, while AI excels at processing data and recognizing patterns, it lacks the essen…

Meetings are a core part of any business’s agenda. But what exactly are you supposed to talk about during the meetings? And when is the best time to schedule them? According to Gino Wickman, the author of Traction, you only really need to schedule two types of meetings throughout the year. These meetings are essential to ensure your business is on track and maintaining your company’s vision. Here…