Reading about business is essential to your growth as an entrepreneur.  A good mindset to cultivate is one of being able to learn new things as quickly as possible, and adapt to as many different situations as fast and intelligently as possible. Entrepreneur skills are acquired and then need to be honed.

Studying up on other business successes is essential to grow one’s knowledge of life and recognize possibilities and opportunities. Ram Charan is a highly acclaimed business advisor, speaker, and author who has coached some of the world’s most successful CEOs. For 35 years, he’s worked behind the scenes at companies like GE, Bank of America, DuPont, Home Depot, 3M, and Verizon.

Charan started his business career as a teenager working in his family’s shoe shop in India. He went on to earn an engineering degree and then an MBA and doctorate in corporate governance from Harvard Business School. His impressive academic career spanned 30 years and he didn’t stop there. He wrote several books and is a successful entrepreneur in his own right.

Not surprisingly, he gets bombarded with questions regarding approaches to business. Some people argue that taking great risks is essential to the growth of their business, and that venture capitalists love aggressive ideas. His opinion is that although successful businesses have been built by business owners taking great risks, truly smart business minds use their entrepreneur skills to accurately measure the risk versus the potential benefit in order to make a balanced decision. Henry Ford, Richard Branson, or Rupert Murdoch, all made bold decisions with uncertain outcomes, but they made a sharp distinction between risk-taking and gambling.