The 100 Best Business Books of All Time
There are ten thousand business books published each year and way over a hundred thousand in print. Most business books are worthless drivel, some are a good article fluffed out into a thin book, and maybe 100 out of those hundred thousand are worth reading. Out of those 100 best, only 10 might have something to say to you.
But how to find those few? Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten, two guys who sell biz books, seem to have read all of the ones in print, and they have done the world a favor by selecting the 100 best business books ever, and then packing summaries of them all into one meta-book. If all you want is their list, you can go to their website and check it out.
But their book is much better than a simple list, and their list is better than most. The two have reviewed, abstracted, and compared all the best 100 in the context of thousands of similar books, unlike say your average Amazon reviewer who may have only read one other business book in his or her life. You get context instead of content. Reading Covert and Sattersten's summaries of these classics is often better than reading the book itself, and the review is always useful in pointing you to the few books or authors you might actually want to read in full.
In addition to including the expected gems like Good to Great, The Effective Executive, and Purple Cow, the 100 Best list also includes many lesser-known titles, some of them oldies-but-goodies, like Up the Organization, The Innovator's Dilemma, and Flow. Not everything is new in business; the wisdom of the past is often surprisingly relevant.
Finally, this book itself is one of the best business books, and can be read alone as a pretty good education in business in its broadest sense, even if you don't read any of the references.
A couple of caveats. One, the authors has included one of my books (Out of Control) in their list, which tickles me greatly but might have warped my perspective. Two, they sell business books (at 800CeoRead) and so their book can be seen as a sales tool. On the other hand, the authors have great incentive to sell and include only the best, and so their list is pretty persuasive. Three, in a slip of bad design each of the 100 books featured on their website does not appear with the review as found in their book, but is featured with the standard publisher verbiage; the author's fantastic summaries and analysis are only found in their printed book. (They sell books, see?)
All in all, this is a great business resource at a modest price. If you took their list and read all 100 books you'd get a better MBA than any university would give you, at a fraction of the cost.
New ideas and opportunities, evaluated on the ability to serve existing customers and earn the necessary margins to support the company, are called sustaining innovations and are always successful ventures for existing (and dominant) firms.
But sometimes, innovation creates a new technology or reveals a new way to organize a firm's resources. This disruptive innovation does not offer the performance needed in the existing market, and entrant companies are forced to find a new set of customers who value innovation on a different set of metrics than those of the traditional market. Existing companies disregard the disruptive innovation because of its lower margins, and the newcomers find a small beachhead outside the existing market, using that market space to develop further. As the performance of disruptive innovations outpaces the sustaining innovations, entrants move into established markets and their lower cost structure forces incumbents further up-market, forfeiting existing profitable markets.
-from the summary of Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma
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Researchers at Marquette University studied over two thousand companies and found that 94 percent of "hyper-growth" companies were started by two or more people. Individual owners made up only 6 percent of the hypergrowth segment and almost one-half of the slow-growth companies.
Despite the evidence that a partnership can lead to success, the thought of taking on a partner makes most budding entrepreneurs cringe.
-sfrom the summary of David Gage's The Partnership Charter
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In the past, access to water or other natural resources determined the economic potential of a region. But Florida believes that the Creative Class is the new resource for economic growth. When choosing where to live, the Creative Class looks for "thick labor markets" that allow for easy horizontal moves from one company to another. Some choose cities with easy access to outdoor recreation, allowing daily engagement to match unpredictable work schedules. As a result of Florida's conclusions and with the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class, regional economic development has been turned on its ear. Spending by state and city governments to attract corporations or finance professional sports arenas was proved useless by Florida's research. Instead, his 3T's--technology, talent, and tolerance--are the new blueprint many areas are using to grow creative capital.
-from the summary of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class
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Titles Are Handy Tools: There is a trade-off here. In one way, titles are a form of psychic compensation, and if too many titles are distributed, the currency is depreciated. But a title is also a tool. If our salesman is a vice president and yours is a sales rep, and both are in a waiting room, guess who goes in first and gets the most attention…If you find you can't get applicants for menial jobs, maybe your titles are obsolete. A restaurant cured a chronic busboy shortage by changing the title to 'logistics engineer.'
-from Robert Townsend's Up the Organization
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Leland Witter
I haven't looked at the 100 Best.. yet, but would highly recommend the Personal MBA http://personalmba.com/ as a great resource for business books. My only problem is the list keeps getting revised while I'm making slow progress - more of a problem on my part, I will admit.
ET
"Three, in a slip of bad design each of the 100 books featured on their website does not appear with the review as found in their book, but is featured with the standard publisher verbiage; the author's fantastic summaries and analysis are only found in their printed book. "
This is may not be bad design, but good marketing. Wouldn't putting the entire book content on their website be bad for book sales?
Kevin Kelly
@ET: The bad design was that they did not indicate the text online was not from the book, so if you read it it does not seem very profound.
msbluebells
Thanks for the book review. Your blog entry inspired me to check out in link to your book Out of Control. I was struck by your insight:
.The main thing computers are good for is creating little worlds so that we can try out the Great Questions. Online communities let us ask the question "what is a democracy; what do you need for it?" by trying to wire a democracy up, and re-wire it if it doesn't work.
I agree! Even with the best of intentions it is easy with systems to cause a tipping point inadvertently. With the recent US Supreme Court decision in the case of Citizens United which allow unlimited contributions into political ads I think we should run more of these virtual experiments before we run them on real people, communities and governments, In wiki worlds they create the "sandbox" where people can play with thoughts and techniques. We have YouTube and other social media tools to allow people to try stuff and collaborate with low entry costs. Is there a way for the open source and web 2.0 move into government and low cost experimentation with all the bright people in the world,
This may be a little off topic. But was inspired by your blog. We have to start using the smarts that books like this holds to build a world we want to live in and share with our children and grandchildren.
Jbrown
Titles Are Handy Tools: There is a trade-off here. In one way, titles are a form of psychic compensation, and if too many titles are distributed, the currency is depreciated. But a title is also a tool. If our salesman is a vice president and yours is a sales rep, and both are in a waiting room, guess who goes in first and gets the most attention…If you find you can't get applicants for menial jobs, maybe your titles are obsolete. A restaurant cured a chronic busboy shortage by changing the title to 'logistics engineer.'
Does anybody outside of management or marketing actually believe that nonsense?
Newsflash: Nobody with those titles is fooled. A sanitation engineer shovels feces. A sandwich artist is a minimum wage earning fast food worker. All this approach does is make titles obsolete, if you call your sales reps vice presidents, within a short time frame everyone will ignore them too. If somebody can't tell the vice president of a company from a sales rep, either they need to be fired or the vice president ought to be.
Noah Fleming
Great to see this.
I actually started reading all 100 books back in the middle of February and am rying to make my way through them all by the end of the year.
So far, I've really enjoyed each and every book I've read.
Shameless plug but you can check out my progress here
http://noahfleming.com/blog/100-business-books
Taylor
Does anyone know of a resource for... not quite sure how to phrase it... "scientifically tested" business studies? As in - "this management style produced these results, but the effects were indistinguishable from the old management style reapplied. The productivity effects are expected to fade over x months."
I often feel like the evidence presented in business books can be so compelling, that I forget I am just taking the author's word for it, and buying that their touted cause led to the observed effect.
Kevin Kelly
@Noah: That's pretty neat. What a journey. Send us a link to your "report" when you are finished.
thomas marban
i used to subscribe to getabstract.com which happens to be an adequate compromise between in-depth reading and times of attention-deficit. they usually provide 4-5 page and audio summaries shortly after the release date.
Noah
Thanks Kevin...
I mentioned this on another blog but it's a lot easier when you turn the TV off for good. I gave up TV back in December and don't think I'll ever go back.
It's a great way to wind down at night. That being said, since I've started I've found my brain is working overtime to process all the great information I'm gathering.
Last night I dreamt of myself working out issues in a manufacturing plant. This was very interesting to me. I found myself applying what I'm been reading about in "The Goal." I had to get all the bottlenecks cleaned up in the factory so we could start shipping on time.