IN MAY 2010, Bloomberg ran a list complied by James Pressley of the Top 50 Business Books published since January 2009. If you wanted to read about financial engineering, Wall Street, economic collapse, and pessimism, this was the perfect list for you. Books like Animal Spirits, Freefall, and The Greatest Trade Ever make up the bulk of the list as is to be expected from the leading media company providing data to financial services. A better list was required though; one that provides a more well rounded, positive view of what is possible in the world of business.
I pulled together a list of forty books that year to show a different perspective and the new ways thought leaders were giving readers to think about business.
A few more years have passed. So, to end 2013, I thought I would update and add to the list.
Enjoy!
- The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau – Good advice for anyone starting a new project, book or business. The key to success: be relentlessly useful.
- The 1% Windfall by Rafi Mohammed – The nuts and bolts of pricing.
- The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni – Smart and healthy companies succeed with lots of clarity.
- The Anatomy of Buzz Revisted by Emanuel Rosen – revision of the classic manual on word of mouth marketing.
- The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar – if you know the jam story from Blink, you know Iyengar’s research on decision-making.
- The Art of The Idea by John Hunt – OBSERVATION No. 11 – “An IDEA is a PARADIGM SHIFTING moment that forward projects FUTURE POTENTIAL in an initially ETHEREAL but progressively tangible MANNER.”
- The Back of The Napkin (Expanded Edition) by Dan Roam – pictures solve problems.
- Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur – beautifully designed book on how to think about business models.
- Change by Design by Tim Brown – IDEO CEO makes case for wider use of design in business
- The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gwande – New Yorker writer and practicing doctor says we should go back to making lists
- Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken – Anthropologist to corporate America says not knowing culture costs companies billions.
- Click by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman – The subtitle says it all “The Magic of Instant Connections”
- Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky – This prognostication makes clear the promise of online collaborations.
- Daring Greatly by Brene Brown – Don’t be confused. Brene is writing for all of us when she asks us to embrace vulnerability and imperfection.
- Decisive by Chip Heath and Dan Heath – The Heath Brothers take on making better decisions.
- Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh – Zappos CEO shares his philosophy.
- Different by Youngme Moon – a wonderfully different take on marketing.
- Drive by Dan Pink – Motivation comes from autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
- The Essential Bennis by Warren Bennis – a wonderful collection of his best writings.
- The Essential Deming by W. Edward Deming – The work might also seem foreign because his prescriptions are still largely ignored. Maybe this new volume will solve that problem.
- Fierce Leadership by Susan Scott – refreshing take on leadership
- Free by Chris Anderson – overview of the price of zeros and the effects that has.
- The Four Conversations by Jeffrey Ford and Laurie Ford – best book I have read on management in the last five years.
- Give and Take by Adam Grant – Givers are more successful than Takers and Matchers. This might be news in the world of business.
- Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen – Collins brings his power metaphors to explain how successful companies grow.
- Greater Than Yourself by Steve Farber – a fable about mentoring and a lot more.
- How The Mighty Fall by Jim Collins – The opposite of Good to Great.
- I Moved Your Cheese by Deepak Malhorta – a thoughtful extension to the original fable and a rebuttal of the original take.
- Ignore Everybody by Hugh Macleod – To use the author’s term, this is a cubicle grenade.
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – Lean production principles meet the world of startups. Iterate and pivot to succeed.
- Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg – The success is simple to explain – the first real business book written for women by a women in business.
- Linchpin by Seth Godin – a book about art, gifts, and shipping.
- The Little Big Things by Tom Peters – classic Tom.
- Minding The Store edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge – a great collection of fiction that takes place in the business setting.
- The New Rules of Marketing & PR (2nd Edition) by David Meerman Scott – The marketing manual for Web 2.0 .
- The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison – Big Idea means Networking book
- The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton – the title says it all.
- Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo – This book won the 2011 FT/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year and shows the important work going on at MIT’s J-PAL as they collect and use data to make better decisions about solving big global problems.
- The Predictioneer’s Game by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita – great book on decision-making
- Priceless by William Poundstone – another book on pricing, but driven by narrative and research.
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhhig – What you can do with sticking to something day after day.
- Rework by 37 Signals – the guys behind Basecamp share their philosophy.
- Rules of Thumb by Alan Webber – Founding editor of Fast Company shares what he has learned doing some amazing things.
- Seizing The White Space by Mark Johnson – Shows how to build entirely new business models.
- Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie – Just buy it, everyone else has.
- Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath – “How to Change When Change Is Hard.”
- Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin – Always interesting insights into how we make decisions.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kanheman – The nobel laureate takes us on a walk through his life’s work that has fundamentally changed our view of how we make decisions.
- Trade-Off by Kevin Maney – Convenience versus fidelity, choose only one.
- What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis – What makes Google different and interesting thought experiments on those applied to other industries.
- Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson – His synthesis of the patterns that lead to successful innovation.