Ask HN: How to build business acumen?

The same way you build technical acumen. Books help but just as you can't learn programming without practicing, you can't learn business solely with your reading list. Do business to understand the intricacies of creating one. Of course, I don't imply to jump-start creating a multi-million dollar startup but to start with modest things.

Sell services, or plugins, or books. Try to understand what your (potential) customers want. Trim down what you need to make and pitch how it can add value to your audience. Find a small niche and expand from there. Once you have a small trajectory of sustainable business, try to figure out how you can grow it. Reach out to people to seek their advice and be resilient against rejection.

I don't think there is a stepwise formula for raising a business. Everyone forms her own way to create it; there are thousands of nontrivial steps hidden in each 'actionable' advice and it's not something that articles can teach you right away, you need to learn it on your own.

Well most likely the oldest way would work best: go into business, make mistakes, build business acumen.

If you're just starting out, I recommend reading business books that are good at explaining things like value proposition, market creation, etc, but also have a compelling narrative.

One book I really like is "The Everything Store" that is a brief history of Amazon.com and the challenges they faced as one of the few high-profile survivors of the dotcom boom.

Another I've enjoyed reading is "Losing the Signal", which covers BlackBerry's rise and fall, starting from its origins in the 1980s to its struggle to adapt to the consumer smartphone age. It's a great read because BB originally began as a telecom engineering company that developed a once-insurmountable advantage in enterprise communications.

Business acumen is a combination of a mindset/attitude + skills relevant to running a successful business. It is best learned by apprenticeship. Failing that, get the best books out there and start reading. Negotiation, organizational behavior, thrift, psychology, forecasting, hiring, execution, sales, etc Read read read. And read some more for the message hidden between the lines. Adjust your behavior to reflect your newfound knowledge. This is my current reading list:

  The E-myth by Michael Gerber
  Felix Dennis: How to get Rich
  Execution; The Discipline of Getting Things Done: RamCharan
  Shoe Dog : Phil Knight