MLA Annotated Bibliography Sample: Startup Companies Research

Belsky, Scott. Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles between Vision and Reality. Portfolio, 2012, 256 pages.

The author studies the human ability to develop organizational habits and leadership skills. The book is based on the six-year research of creative leaders and productive teams. The author offers the analysis of different approaches to the realization of ideas and underscores the importance of making the ideas happen, not the process of generation.

Griffith, Erin. “Why Startups Fail, According to Their Founders.” Fortune, Time Inc., 25 Sept. 2014, fortune.com/2014/09/25/why-startups-fail-according-to-their-founders/. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

The author explains the term “a failure post-mortem.” The article represents how the tendency of writing failure post-mortems have appeared and why they have become so popular. The author also displays the most frequent reasons for collapse and provides the readers with the statistics based on analysis of 101 startup post-mortems. She also cites Steve Hogan, a manager of a startup shop, who expresses his personal opinion on the most frequent reasons for startup bankruptcy.

Ries, Eric. The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term. Currency, 2017, 400 pages.

The book is a sequel to The Lean Startup, which was published in 2011. The author changes his field of study. Instead of analyzing the activities of successful startup companies, he focuses on another type of organization: multinational companies with revenues in the millions of dollars. The book demonstrates how “business sharks” can use the entrepreneurial principles to guarantee steady growth and adapt to the constant changes of the business environment in the 21st century.

Robehmed, Natalie. “What Is a Startup?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 16 Dec. 2013, www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2013/12/16/what-is-a-startup/#25d5b7244044. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

The author of the article analyzes the origin of the term “startup” and gives examples of various definitions provided by different sources. The article also draws the line between startups and non-startups or companies that were established as startups and then became multinational companies. The author cites startup co-founders and CEOs, and also dictionaries in order to combine their definition and boil down to an exhaustive conclusion.

Zook, Chris, and James Allen. Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change. Harvard Business Review Press, 2012, 288 pages.

The authors provide the evidence to prove their major statement: the simplicity is a key element for business strategies nowadays. The complex systems are hard to renovate and change. If the company maintains simplicity as a base for the development, it is much easier to adapt to new circumstances of the economic environment. The most successful firms follow a repeatable business model that allows constant innovations without changing the basic work principles.

The book displays that any complex idea is, in fact, a range of smaller and simpler ideas combined together. The authors study the business strategies implied by Apple, Nike, IKEA, and other multinational companies that succeed to maintain a high ranking on the market for a long time period.