The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: How Many of These Books Have You Read?

Are you looking for a good book to read this weekend?  Pick up a copy of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and it may lead to a whole bunch of good reading! 

Here is the list of business books that made the list, published by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten (these guys are executives from a company called 800-CEO-READ) earlier this year:

You: Improving your life, your person and your strengths.

• Flow by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
• How to Be a Star at Work by Robert E. Kelley
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey B. Mackay
• The Power of Intuition by Gary Klein
• What Should I Do with My Life? by Po Bronson
• Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss/Theodore Geisel
• Chasing Daylight by Eugene O'Kelly

Leadership: Inspiration. Challenge. Courage. Change.

• On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis
• The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem
• The Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
• Leadership Is an Art by Max De Pree
• The Radical Leap by Steve Farber
• Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will by Tichy and Sherman
• Leading Change by John P. Kotter
• Questions of Character by Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.
• The Story Factor by Annette Simmons
• Never Give In! Speeches by Winston Churchill

Strategy: Eight organizational blueprints from which to draft your own.

• In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
• Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove
• Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
• Discovering the Soul of Service by Leonard Berry
• Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
• Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad

Sales and Marketing: Approaches and pitfalls in the ongoing process of creating customers.

• Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, PhD
• Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
• A New Brand World by Scott Bedbury with Stephen Fenichell
• Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith
• Zag by Marty Neumeier
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
• Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
• How to Become a Rainmaker by Jeffrey J. Fox
• Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
• The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Rules and Scorekeeping: The all-important numbers behind the game.

• Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
• Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and Joe Knight
• The Balanced Scorecard by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

Management: Guiding and directing the people around you.

• The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
• Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming
• Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno
• Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy
• The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
• The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack with Bo Burlingham
• First, Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
• Now, Discover Your Strengths by Buckingham and Clifton
• The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono

Biographies: Seven lives. Unlimited lessons.

• Titan by Ron Chernow
• My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
• The HP Way by David Packard
• Personal History by Katharine Graham
• Moments of Truth by Jan Carlzon
• Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey
• Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson

Entrepreneurship: Seven guides to the passion and practicality necessary for any new venture.

• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber
• The Republic of Tea by Mel Ziegler, Patricia Ziegler, and Bill Rosenzweig
• The Partnership Charter by David Gage
• Growing a Business by Paul Hawken
• Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
• The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar with Kent Lineback

Narratives: Six industry tales of both fortune and failure.

• McDonald’s: Behind the Arches by John F. Love
• American Steel by Richard Preston
• The Force by David Dorsey
• The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Innovation & Creativity: Insight into the process of developing new ideas.

• Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie
• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman
• Jump Start Your Business Brain by Doug Hall
• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger Von Oech
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
• The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

Big Ideas: The future of business books lies here.

• The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy
• Out of Control by Kevin Kelly
• The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
• Driven by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
• To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
• Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Takeaways: What everyone is looking for.

• The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins
• Up the Organization by Robert Townsend
• Beyond the Core by Chris Zook
• Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
• What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
• The Team Handbook by Peter Scholtes, Brian Joiner, and Barbara Streibel
• A Business and Its Belief by Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
• Lucky or Smart? by Bo Peabody
• The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman
• Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko
• More Than You Know by Michael J. Mauboussin

While I've read a lot of these books, I was surprised how many I've not read.  There is so much left to learn!

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

Comments

[Becky]

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is also one of my favorite business books so it was good to see it listed. One that I did not see, in which I thought was equally beneficial is a newer book written by Kenneth Eisold titled, "What You Don’t Know You Know: Our Hidden Motives in Life, Business, and Everything Else." As I read through this book I had several 'Ah Ha' moments... why didn't I think of these ideas before.

http://eisold.rt7media.net/excerpt/

[Todd Sattersten]

Ben - Thanks for the recommendation to your readers.

Just wanted to mention that there is a bonus chapter for The 100 Best that you can read and download at Scribd.com:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/17729939/The-100-Best-Business-Books-of-All-Time-Bonus-Chapter-on-Industry-Books

And if you think we left a great business book out of The 100 Best, you can add your own to My Favorite Business Book :

http://myfavoritebizbook.com/

Thanks again!

Todd Sattersten