The 100 Best is one of those projects whose path I never saw, whose trail disappeared for awhile and since its publication, has taken me to places I could never have predicted.

I wrote about some of the quirks and coincidences that have stayed with me. There are many more.

There were the author photos that never saw the light of day. There was the two weeks at a table double checking the cross-references with Jack. The guy who said our book was like Google on paper. We signed alot of books; one Saturday my oldest son came and helped. We got published in the Harvard Business Review. And who doesn’t love seeing their book in translated and interpeted into another language.

We held events at Harvard and Stanford with faculty authors from The 100 Best. I got up early on a Wednesday and drove eight hours from Milwaukee to Lexington, Kentucky for a book signing that no one showed up for.  Ryan Louie tweets me every time he finishes another book and he has read 88 of the 100 books to date.

With the publication of the third edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, I started to think back to what else I could share to show other views into the work we did.

I was searching back through old files I found a talk I did at the Commonwealth Club of California in 2009. I talk about some of the great anecdotes from the books organized around five themes that Jack and I saw show up over and over again. By this point, I have given this speech a couple dozen times.  It not perfect, but it conveys the material well.

I also remembered that I wrote an essay on how to get more out of the business books you read. The piece was published on ChangeThis and has been downloaded over 6500 times. We added the essay to the end of the paperback edition of The 100 Best.

So much to be grateful for in connection with this project.

If you’d like a copy, the new edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time is available fine book retailers everywhere.