100 Best Business Books

I think all of us who are serious about improving our managing skills ought to read when we can. It can be tough to carve out the time, but there is a wealth of information out there — good ideas, practical skills, effective strategies, new ways of thinking that can really help us do our job more effectively, with less stress and more joy.

But there are more than a million business books available right now. So when your time is limited, how do you choose?

Well, you can start with the books in the Humans At Work curriculum, which is my “best of” list for managers looking to establish or improve the core skills of managing people well. I see them as the foundation of a good manager’s library. They are all books that I still read over and over again.

I’ve decided to add two more books to my “essential” list, and will be including them as program materials. They won’t be incorporated into the general curriculum; rather, I will offer them as “graduation gifts” to take managers into the next phase of practicing and expanding their skills.

I’ll talk about the second book in an upcoming post. Today I want to focus on The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten.

This is a great resource for every manager. Covert and Sattersten have identified books of big ideas and practical benefit in a variety of areas — self awareness, leadership, strategy, management, innovation and more. They provide cogent summaries of each book — the central concepts, perspective, and the benefits it can offer. They share their personal experience of, and response to, each book. And they point you to additional books and resources. This isn’t just a “list,” it’s a road map to help you navigate through the jungle of those million-plus books that none of us have time to read. I’m turning to it right now for insights on getting things done more effectively and staying strategic: another time, I’ll probably be diving into case histories or scorekeeping. This is a resource I can turn to in a variety of situations when I want to jumpstart my thinking in a particular area, or when I want to remind myself what smart people have already said on a particular topic.

I’ll talk about the other “graduation” book in a forthcoming post. Today, I encourage you to look through the “100 Best” table of contents, and read an excerpt, at amazon.com.