My Top 25 (and counting) Business Book List

Periodically people ask me what business books I would recommend?  Or which books have most influenced my thinking?  Being a book junkie, I have a hard time whittling this down, but after much thought here is my short(!) list of 25...for now.

(Note:  Book title links will take you to an Amazon.com reference.)

Leadership, Management, and Entrepreneurship

• Intrapreneuring by Gifford Pinchot (1978).  As a student engineer at 3M, this is THE book that first awakened my interest in technology commercialization which eventually forced me off the pure path of engineering and into the dark side (i.e. marketing).  (My father only forgave me after I became a CEO!)
• Leadership and the Quest for Integrity by Joseph Badaracco (1993).  If you think values are soft and squishy, read this.  I can safely credit the success of my first turnaround to the lessons taught here.
• Hidden Value: How Great Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People  by Charles O'Reilly, Jeffrey Pfeffer (2000). There are a lot of books that teach you how to hire and build a high performance team with "A" players.  This one has the refreshing approach of showing how a great company can be built with us regular folks.
• The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert Sutton (2000). As an MBA student, I had the great fortune to take a class called Power & Politics taught by Jeffrey Pfeffer.  Case discussions were always somewhat terrifying; Pfeffer had a knack for shredding conventional wisdom and half-baked solutions with a keen understanding of how things really worked.  His books do the same.
• Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert Sutton (2006).  Ditto the above.
• The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge (2006). Senge approaches business as an organic entity.  Where others see functions, he sees dynamic human systems.
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins (2001). If you take nothing else away from this book, take away the concept of the "flywheel".
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt (2004).  Reads like a novel and does a great job of conveying the implications of continuous improvement via Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.

Marketing and Sales

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) by Robert Cialdini (1984).  The first time I read this book, my blood ran cold.  If there is ever a course in sleazy marketing, this book could be the text. Cialdini exposes the psychological underpinnings of common marketing tactics.  I had to do a re-read of Badarraco afterwards to shake the willies.
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore (1991).  Since it's initial publication, this has become part of the canon for technology commercialization in Silicon Valley.  Moore focuses on the startup transition from early adopter to mainstream markets.
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank (2005).  Blank is to Moore as the new testament is to the old in the canon of Silicon Valley technology commercialization.  Blank is father of the Customer Development methodology focused on helping startups gain first traction with early adopter customers.  Customer Development plus Agile Software Development are at the heart of today's Lean Startup movement.
• Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, Jon Warshawsky (2005).  This should be required reading for everyone in marketing communications with violators subject to incremental immolation over a hyperthermal heat source.
• Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon (2010). Normally I would not put a current book on the list that has yet to withstand the test of time, but this one is the exception.  Moon goes beyond traditional branding.  Branding 2.0? Anti-branding?
• The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World's Best Companies by Robert Miller, Stephen Heiman, Tad Tuleja (1985).  This classic on selling to major accounts is still the best around.  And if you're ever offered a chance to participate in Miller-Heiman sales training, take it!

Strategy

• Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance by Michael Porter (1998).  The bible of competitive strategy.  Porter's Five Forces analysis for industry dynamics is now a staple of MBA training.
• The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market by Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema (1997). Goes to the heart of effective strategy:  you can't do it all and you don't need to.  One of the best texts on strategic alignment that I know.
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W.Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne (2005).  Picks up where Porter leaves off.  Where Porter focuses on existing industry competition, Kim and Mauborgne focus on disruptive strategies.
• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (1997).  Digs deeper than Kim and Mauborgne in discussing technology enabled disruptive strategies.

People & Organizations

• Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence by David Keirsey (1998).  INTJ?  ESFP?  One of the most widely used frameworks for personality classification.  Highly recommended if you want to understand how motivations, worldviews, and communication styles differ for different people.
• Human Dynamics : A New Framework for Understanding People and Realizing the Potential in Our Organizations by Sandra Seagal (1997).  The textbook for the most effective interpersonal communications seminar I ever took.
• Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John Gardner (1995).  While at Stanford, I also had the great fortune to take classes with John Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in President Lyndon Johnson's administration.  Gardner was an inspiration and a living example of someone who stayed vital through a process of continuous reinvention.  Read this if you don't want to end up the old curmudgeon in the corner railing against that new-fangled teleportation technology.

Sociological Environment

• Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1971).  While he didn't predict everything right, forty years later, its impressive to see how much Toffler did get right.  And the major trends he spotlighted continue to roll through our lives today.
• Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut Revised and Updated Edition by David Shenk (1998).  One of the earliest and still best essays outlining the differences between living in a world where finding information was the challenge vs. one where information glut is the issue.

The Numbers

• Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports, Second Edition by Howard Schilit (2010).  Just revised, this classic should be required reading for all investors or anyone involved with corporate oversight.  I think the Enron guys used this as their text book.
• How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff (1993).  Should be required reading for anyone in market research and for anyone who has ever suffered through the "market opportunity" section of a business plan.

Finally, as a Christian, there is one other book that is significant to me from a business perspective (among others).  That book is the Bible.  I've found few books dispensing advice as hard nosed and pragmatic as the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Happy reading!

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