The most recommended business books

I like a good wine (though Madeira isn’t one of my favorites). I like even more a book that tells me about wine—and about many other things that I had not previously connected to wine. That’s what Oceans of Wine does and does magnificently.

David Hancock is a pioneering scholar who has taught us to understand the Atlantic Ocean “world” as an interconnected space of exchanges that remade all the individuals and societies surrounding it. In this book, he shows how merchants in Britain, Portugal, and British North America transformed Madeira from a rather ordinary wine into a transatlantic bestseller.

Like most of my favorite historians, Hancock has dug up a treasure trove of unexplored sources to write a big story in a wholly new way.

This is a pie-in-the-sky 30-year plan for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by joint worldwide implementation of 80 “solutions.” For each of these, the book proposes a number of giga-tons of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and the resulting dollar cost and savings.

I admire Hawken for his quantitative approach and his imaginative list of “solutions.” The numbers reveal the enormity of the drawdown enterprise. Some “solutions” are merely the usual renewables. Some came as a nice surprise to me, such as LED lanterns with batteries and small solar panels for residents in off-the-grid regions.

But I fear many of the solutions will never be rigorously implemented and would have a high policing cost to ensure compliance. For instance, the first solution involves the collection of refrigerant gases from expiring air conditioners. Who will voluntarily pay for this?

This book helped me stop thinking about singular problems and solutions and taught me to think in terms of relationships. 

I read it at a time when I believed the electric car to be a solution to oil dependence and the greenhouse effect. Electric cars do not directly produce CO2 and are more energy efficient. What I missed was the fact that cars are much more than oil-burning CO2-emitters. They limit our street life and kill more than a million people in traffic each year.

By solving one problem without looking at the big picture, we enlarge other problems and create new ones. Will cobalt wars follow after the oil wars? Reading this book felt like walking around with a flashlight in my head and then a construction lamp switching on.

This bestselling book is not so much about your memory as how to implant lasting memories in others.

How is it that some events and pieces of information are amazingly memorable, whereas others are lost as soon as our mental backs are turned? In a series of entertaining real-life examples, the authors propose and illustrate ways in which information can be “made to stick.” These include some obvious ones like getting people’s attention and building on their existing knowledge – stuff they are interested in.

Other factors are less obvious; set up an intriguing puzzle, provide some really unexpected information, especially of an emotional kind, embed the new information in an attention-grabbing story. Of course knowing how to teach effectively also reveals much about how memory works!

Hicks envisaged an economy in which individuals choose to offer labour for income to purchase products of their effort or to spend time in uncompensated leisure.

His is a theorical economy: individuals and firms interact to determine current and future supplies and demands. It establishes the laws governing the price system regulating exchange and production.

In this world of transparent, free movement of goods and resources without government, regulations, banks, and unions, there is no room for monopolies or capital accumulation. 

Money as intermediary is simply a unit of account. Growth is the outcome of needs, efforts, and mutual cooperation.

Value and Capital, a jewel, is the core of current microeconomics, but Hicks’ economy, in which inflation and income disparities are non-issues, is not a capitalist but a market one; ironically present microeconomists conflate the two.

This is much the best recent book on business. It shows the changing shapes of companies in the era of platforms, complex supply chains and more. Its greatest value is to remind us that great companies are essentially an expression of collective intelligence, and that their longevity depends on loving what they do. It documents many examples where firms forgot this, pursued short-term profit and ended up destroying their value - not just Enron but also others like Boeing or Deutsche Bank. Its also a healthy alternative to naive views of companies as nothing more than collections of contracts. Anyone with any role in business or finance should read it, and will learn far more than from 99% of airport books on business.

Everyday neighbors acting to fix our own problems is in our founding DNA. Over the last 125 years, another tradition has grown up in our country: the expectation that anyone who makes it really big will subsequently give away lots of wealth to help others prosper.

The archetype for this was John D. Rockefeller, and this is the best narrative of his success—first as a business mogul and then as the most influential philanthropist in history. Rockefeller made many wise gifts that elevated living standards, science, religion, food production, medical research, and more.

The Almanac of American Philanthropy calculates that more than 60 Nobel laureates in medicine, biochemistry, and health had their work accelerated by Rockefeller gifts. 

Pitch Anything is an established work in the pitching and negotiation book categories. It is not perfect, but it is one of the best books for introducing entrepreneurs to the importance of pitching, selling, and negotiating persuasively. Entrepreneurs must pitch to attract co-founders and early team members, to obtain early stage funding, to close customers and other commercial partners, to close later stage funding rounds, and, ultimately, to go public or exit in a sale. While Pitch Anything is a good book, the brashness of some of its advice, particularly around what Klaff calls “frames,” do not fit all persons or situations. Some contexts require full-on Machiavellian tactics; others warrant more of a “Winning Friends and Influencing People” approach. Nonetheless, it is useful to understand which situation you are in and the available plays to run.

Armed with those caveats, I suggest readers of Pitch Anything read Chapter… show more.

I like this because you can easily pick from its one hundred separate sections. In a world where pressure on costs is so strident, it is easy to overlook ideas that might make a positive difference to any organization's financial status.

Many people in organizations suffer from what might be called a ‘numeracy shortfall’ and need some help in this area. This book is clear and understandable and could make the difference between profit and loss. Who would not like that?

I love getting opportunities to chat with Joey Coleman. He’s one of the biggest risk-takers I’ve ever met - and those risks have panned out! Joey is one of the world's leading experts on employee experience, and this book reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to recruit top talent, bring them on board successfully, and keep them engaged while they produce remarkable results for years to come.

In Never Lose an Employee Again, Coleman offers a step-by-step playbook for creating a retention plan with long-term success. With more than fifty proven case studies from organizations on seven continents, Coleman details how you can forge a relationship with your people during each of the eight phases of the employee journey. For each phase, Coleman walks you through the six forms of communication integral to success (in-person, email, phone, mail, video, and even gifts) so you can better… show more.