Books for imagining work beyond your founder role

If every description of yourself turns into an update about the company, you may want a book that asks what else work could become. That question need not begin with selling, quitting or rejecting ambition. It can begin with choosing which kind of reading would help you imagine a wider working life.

Infinite Upside considers what continuing ownership or a sale would mean for the owner. Working Identity addresses career reinvention. The Pathless Path offers a personal account of questioning a familiar story of achievement.

1. Infinite Upside: what ownership is making possible

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 12 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live considers a sale alongside the income, work and responsibility of keeping a company. Receiving capital creates another decision about what to do with it. Continuing to own means continuing to carry the operation through changes.

   Choose the memoir if you want those possibilities examined by an owner who remains interested in building. The chapter asks what a sale might make room for and whether the owner still enjoys the company and has useful plans for it. It gives purpose a place beside the transaction.

   That is a useful reading focus when your question concerns the place of ownership in your life. You can consider what you want the business to make possible without requiring the author's preferred arrangement to become yours.

2. Working Identity: exploring a different working future

   By Herminia Ibarra.

   Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career approaches career change through exploring possible futures. The publisher's description of the updated edition places trying alternatives at the center of reinvention.

   Imagine an invented founder who can describe her current role in detail but has only vague ideas about work she might want later. She wants to learn how people investigate a possible direction while their understanding of themselves is still changing.

   Her sample question could be: does this treatment make a possible kind of work concrete enough to investigate? The question is what you would want to spend a working day doing. Investigate it if you want to explore possible changes before demanding one perfectly clear future.

3. The Pathless Path: questioning the story around achievement

   By Paul Millerd.

   The author's book site provides the introduction to The Pathless Path. Millerd describes reconsidering an employed career organized around achievement and searching for a different relationship with work.

   Consider this option if a personal narrative is more inviting than a career-change treatment. You may want to spend time with someone questioning an accepted route before trying to name your own next role.

   Keep the starting circumstances visible. Millerd's employed-career account raises different obligations from those of an owner with a continuing company. Read for the questions it opens, including what makes work worth doing to you. The story need not prescribe an exit from your present commitments to be useful.

Let the question be specific

Choose what you want reading to clarify: the purpose of continued ownership, a possible kind of work or the achievement story you have been following. These are different starting points, and none requires you to decide your company's future before opening the book.

For the separate question of what a setback calls for, use the setback-reading selection. For the size and organization of a company you intend to keep running, the business-book selection serves another purpose.

For an owner's account that keeps business ambition beside the life it supports, read Infinite Upside. Try the opening passage, then follow the reading path on life around ownership.