Staff Picks
Let Your Business Education Begin...
- Chantal W.
- Sunday, December 01, 2019
Collection
Don't have time to run out and get your MBA, but still interested in learning more about business? Here is a list of business books that many consider "classics" that may help inform you as an entrepreneur, investor or lifelong learner. So, read like a boss!
Business Adventures
Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street
Published in 2014
Presents twelve stories of success or disasters among prominent companies, including the disastrous Ford Edsel, the rise of Xerox, and the scandal at General Electric.
Creativity, Inc.
Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
Published in 2014
"In 1986, Ed Catmull co-founded Pixar, a modest start-up with an immodest goal: to make the first-ever computer animated movie. Nine years later, Pixar released Toy Story, which went on to revolutionize the industry, gross $360 million, and establish Pixar as one of the most successful, innovative, and emulated companies on earth. This book details how Catmull built an enduring creative culture -- one that doesn't just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, communication, and originality, but committed to them, no matter how difficult that often proved to be. As he discovered, pursuing excellence isn't a one-off assignment. It's an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And one he was born to do"-- Provided by publisher.
Alibaba
The House That Jack Ma Built
Published in 2016
Traces the founding of Alibaba, the world's second largest Internet company, by an English teacher from humble origins, drawing on exclusive interviews to explore how the company and Jack Ma have become icons and leading employers in China's booming private sector.
Good to Great
Why Some Companies Make the Leap--and Others Don't
Published in 2001
The author uses his research on the Fortune 500 to create a blueprint for turning good companies into spectacular ones.
Great by Choice
Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck
Published in 2011
"Great by Choice" distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today. With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness--beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years--in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these "10X companies" to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Published in 2013
A leading management consultant outlines seven organizational rules for improving effectiveness and increasing productivity at work and at home.
Getting to Yes
Negotiating Agreement Without Giving in
Published in 2011
"Since it was first published in 1981 Getting to Yes has become a central book in the Business Canon: the key text on the psychology of negotiation. Its message of "principled negotiations"--finding acceptable compromise by determining which needs are fixed and which are flexible for negotiating parties--has influenced generations of businesspeople, lawyers, educators and anyone who has sought to achieve a win-win situation in arriving at an agreement. It has sold over 8 million copies worldwide in 30 languages, and since it was first published by Penguin in 1991 (a reissue of the original addition with Bruce Patton as additional coauthor) has sold over 2.5 million copies--which places it as the #10 bestselling title overall in Penguin Books, and #3 bestselling nonfiction title overall. We have recently relicensed the rights to Getting to Yes, and will be doing a new revised edition--a 30th anniversary of the original publication and 20th of the Penguin edition. The authors will be bringing the book up to date with new material and a assessment of the legacy and achievement of Getting to Yes after three decades"-- Provided by publisher.
Rise of the Robots
Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
Published in 2015
"In Silicon Valley the phrase "disruptive technology" is tossed around on a casual basis. No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend various sectors of the job market. But Rise of the Robots asks a bigger question: Can accelerating technology disrupt our entire economic system to the point where a fundamental restructuring is required? Companies like Facebook and YouTube may only need a handful of employees to achieve enormous valuations, but what will be the fate of those of us not lucky or smart enough to have gotten into the great shift from human labor to computation?"-- Provided by publisher.
The E-myth Revisited
Published in 2004
In this guide through all stages of the entrepreneurial process from infancy to the last stage of business maturation, Michael E. Gerber explains common professional pitfalls and the techniques for successfully overcoming them.
Think and Grow Rich
The Landmark Bestseller--now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
Published in 2005
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Building a Business when There Are No Easy Answers
Published in 2014
Delivering Happiness
A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Published in 2010
Tony Hsieh--the widely-admired CEO of on-line shoe retailer, Zappos--explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors and backers. Even better, he shows how creating happiness and record results go hand-in-hand.
The Personal MBA
Master the Art of Business
Published in 2012
Getting an MBA is an expensive choice-one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping B-school altogether. Josh Kaufman founded PersonalMBA.com as an alternative to the business school boondoggle. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. Now, he shares the essentials of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, negotiation, operations, productivity, systems design, and much more, in one comprehensive volume. The Personal MBAdistills the most valuable business lessons into simple, memorable mental models that can be applied to real-world challenges.
Blue Ocean Strategy
How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
Published in 2005
In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, Kim and Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and 30 industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans"--untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves--which the authors call "value innovation"--create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant.--From publisher description.
The Box
How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Published in 2006
The Lean Startup
How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Published in 2011
Presents a customer-based approach to business that relies on feedback from consumers to direct the company instead of a business plan and product centered approach.
Lean in
Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Published in 2013
In "Lean In", Sheryl Sandberg -- Facebook COO and one of "Fortune" magazine's most powerful women in business -- looks at what women can do to help themselves, and make the small changes in their life that can effect change on a more universal scale. She draws on her own experiences working in some of the world's most successful businesses, as well as academic research, to find practical answers to the problems facing women in the workplace.
How Google Works
Published in 2014
"Jack Welch's Straight from the Gut was once the essential primer for managers, but today's leaders need a new playbook. In HOW GOOGLE WORKS, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg distill their decades of working in the high-tech industry into a practical and fun-to-read guide for those who want to succeed in an ever-changing business landscape. The book offers how-to advice on strategy, corporate culture, talent, decision-making, innovation, communication and dealing with disruption. The authors explain how the confluence of three seismic changes--the internet, mobile, and cloud computing--has shifted the balance of power between consumer and corporation. The companies that thrive will be the ones that create superior products and attract a new breed of multi-faceted employees whom the authors dub "smart creatives." The management maxims are illustrated with previously unreported anecdotes from Google's corporate history. "Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers focusing on the lessons the management team learned the hard way," says Rosenberg. "The class slides all said 'Google confidential' until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how Google empowers employees to succeed.""-- Provided by publisher.
The Fifth Discipline
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
Published in 2006
This revised edition of Peter Senge's bestselling classic, The Fifth Discipline, is based on fifteen years of experience in putting the book's ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization's ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people's ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning "disabilities" that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations - ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire. The revised and updated Currency edition of this business classic contains over one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies like BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, and organizations like Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank. It features a new Foreword about the success Peter Senge has achieved with learning organizations since the book's inception, as well as new chapters on Impetus (getting started), Strategies, Leaders' New Work, Systems Citizens, and Frontiers for the Future. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them; bridge teamwork into macro-creativity; free you of confining assumptions and mindsets; teach you to see the forest and the trees; end the struggle between work and personal time.--Book jacket.
Start with Why
How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Published in 2009
Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over? People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. It was their natural ability to start with why that enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things. In studying the leaders who've had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way -- and it's the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY. Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit -- those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others? Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don't do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.
Too Big to Fail the Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves
Published in 2010
Presents a moment-by-moment account of the recent financial collapse that documents state efforts to prevent an economic disaster, offering insight into the pivotal consequences of decisions made throughout the past decade.
Black Box Thinking
The Surprising Truth About Success (and Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes)
Published in 2015
The Black Swan
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Published in 2010
Examines the role of the unexpected, discussing why improbable events are not anticipated or understood properly, and how humans rationalize the black swan phenomenon to make it appear less random.
Zero to One
Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Published in 2014
"EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS HAPPENS ONLY ONCE. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I've learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX. The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. Ask not, what would Mark do? Ask: WHAT VALUABLE COMPANY IS NOBODY BUILDING?"-- Provided by publisher.
The Outsiders
Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
Published in 2012