Best Business Books?

Filed in archive General on May 15, 2007

U.S. News & World Report recently had 14 bigshots from various walks of life give their ideas on the five best business books. Being a non-fiction junkie, I was interested in the titles they might choose, but I assumed I would hear the same names again and again. Interestingly, that wasn't the case. In fact, of the 70 combined choices from the heavyweights, only two books got more than one mention.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't by Jim Collins was listed by four different people, and Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, a 1980 book from Michael Porter, was listed twice. (Interestingly, the two who chose Competitive Strategy also chose Good to Great.)

Otherwise, the selections were all over the board. Peter Drucker was mentioned multiple times, but no one book was mentioned more than once. Ayn Rand's biggies Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were each mentioned once.

To me, the most interesting/eclectic list came from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, who included The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and The Discourses by the second-century B.C. philosopher Epictetus in his list, along with a little Noam Chomsky for flavor.

I'm going to bookmark this list and try to get to some of these books, as I've only read a small handful, and have not read either of the two mentioned multiple times.

Even if you don't particularly like business books, I would suggest that part of successful personal finance is being successful at what you do for a living, and for most of us that means understanding business. Even if we don't own a company, understanding business from an ownership perspective opens up your eyes to how to do your job better.

Here's the complete Best Business Books feature from U.S. News and World Report.