Survival Leadership

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You (Penguin Group, 2009) By Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten

Many leaders today move at the speed of light. We’re all working harder, faster, and hopefully smarter than ever, and still it’s hard to keep up with our discipline: Business. If you read (or had the time to read) Jim Collins (Good to Great), you know how important it is for all of us to have an intellectual discipline that is our own and to keep it honed.

And in business that discipline is, well, business. However, the press of the day often crowds out our wish to “sharpen the saw” (Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). Well, if you want to manage better by engaging employees (a la Buckingham and Clifton’s First Break all the Rules) or influence people’s decisions like Cialdini’s Influence, Grodon’s The Purple Cow, or Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, then this book’s a good read for you. You can get the essence of all these books and many more in about 15 minutes of reading the excellent summaries of these authors. In the coming week, I will post several things I liked about Collins’s book…which contains 100 book summaries of a select list of books on business.

This week, I’ll chat about the book’s informative and very useful sidebars, the categories it’s organized into with sample books reviewed in each category, some of my favorite quotes taken from best biz books, and more.