3 books you should read before expanding your startup into a new emerging market

Maybe you’re like Bill Gates, who takes a full week out of the office every to read books, and then goes on for another 12 months of business and life adventure fueled with inspiration.

If you’re reading these lines, you’re likely interested in the emerging markets and what they offer in terms of startups and entrepreneurs. For your Christmas reading list, here are three suggestions to start 2015 with more brainpower.

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region

This book, by Joe Studwell shows how countries too can be run like startups. That said, it’s not your typical startup book. In fact, it doesn’t mention the word once.

In this brilliant, data-backed volume, the author tells us how Asian countries became the success stories we hear about in the news, with a particular focus on China, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

Through land reform, then a strong manufacturing policy, and at last a financial industry kept “on a short leash”, Studwell convincingly shows how countries with very low development levels and almost 100% rural populations climbed their way up to become the economic powerhouses we know today.

You will also learn that it does not always work. Countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines are considered half or complete failures when it comes to development.

But, hey, it means there are still some 600-million people there waiting for your entrepreneurial skill.

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos

Entrepreneurs from chaotic countries, unite! Written in a more personal style, Sarah Lacy’s Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky sums up her experiences of a year touring the world and its most amazing doers.

Lacy previously worked for Techcrunch, and the founder and managing editor of Pando Daily, another US-based tech blog. Her first chapter shows how the United States may be “losing it”.

By outsourcing a lot of technology related services in China and India, entrepreneurs from these countries learned to innovate, adapting new products at home, and building cheaper ones for the Western markets as well.

The rest of the book follows Lacey across Brazil, India, Israel, China, Indonesia and Rwanda. Stories abound and all show that being an entrepreneur is possible in any place, any culture, provided the will is there.

Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East

Last and probably most comprehensive, Christopher Schroeder’s Startup Rising shows how entrepreneurship is a necessity and a source of jobs for countries where economy has been stolen by a few oligarchs and bureaucrats.

Taking into account the roots and the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the author travels across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and more countries in the region to show how fast startups are developing there.

In a place where regimes used to keep the status quo as a convenient excuse to steal resources and mobility from the population, it’s clear now that these countries need entrepreneurs. The figures are self-explanatory: “100 million new people will be entering the workforce by 2012, and another 135 million who are under age 15”, so governments are understandingly increasingly keen to support job creators to avoid another wave of revolutions.

The author also creates different categories of entrepreneurs, such as the Improvisers (copycats), Problem solvers (very local ventures with a social impact) and Global Players (working and serving in lots of markets through diaspora for instance), to make a fast-moving environment more readable.

So depending where you read us, don’t lose too much time. Order the books online, pack one less pair of shoes for your next holiday trip and bring them with you. Oh, and in case you’re still working for someone else or wonder about your next move, you’re sure to find enough energy to do things coming back home.

Image by az via Flickr.