This year has brought a bumper harvest of great business books to help you develop your economic, leadership and communication skills to grow your business. You may not be prepared to jump into the academic 700 pages of French economist Thomas Piketty’s surprise bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century but there are plenty of entertaining alternatives.
For something fast and fun, you may want to check out Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. This covers a lot of the same territory as their previous Freakonomics wrapped up in a “how-to” package. Some of their points are obvious — and some may be simply wrong — but the stories are always amusing.
On a more serious note, you might want to check out Timothy Geithner’s Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises for an insider’s insight into the 2008 financial crisis. The former U.S. secretary of the treasury came under a lot of criticism while in office for poor communication, a flaw he acknowledges in his book, but this candid memoir is very well written. He not only lays out the genesis of the crisis and the complexities of the U.S. government response in a way understandable to a general reader, he tells the story in a compelling and interesting style.
Geithner might have found it helpful if he had read Carmine Gallo’s Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds. The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference features brief but powerful talks by the world’s leading innovators and thinkers, many of which are also made available online. Gallo interviewed many of these presenters and analyzed the talks of many more, and sets out the nine communication principles they all share.
Simon Sinek’s TED talk is the second most watched presentation on ted.com and in his new Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, he passionately makes the case for business leaders who “in hard times, would sooner sacrifice their numbers to protect their people rather than sacrifice people to protect their numbers.” Sinek brings together biology, studies of public and private organizations, and insightful stories to ably bolster his argument that the primary duty of a leader is to create an atmosphere of trust and co-operation within an organization.
Even if you have been following the revelations about high frequency traders and the U.S. stock market in the business news, you still may want to pick up Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis. His account of how a Canadian trader working on Wall Street discovered that some firms were being allowed to use supercomputers, lightning-fast networks and sophisticated software algorithms to skim a few pennies off millions of stock market trades reads like a true life detective story. The second part of the book outlining the establishment of an alternative exchange that wouldn’t be subject to such gaming is interesting but less compelling.
OK, I’ll admit that Scott Stratten’s QR Codes Kill Kittens: How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees and Drive your Business into the Ground isn’t really a “great” book but any business book that is funny enough to make you laugh coffee out your nose deserves some attention. This collection of misguided internet marketing attempts is probably most appreciated by those who think they are savvy enough to know better but Stratten’s hilarious examples really bring home some of the basic Marketing 101 principals, like “don’t do something you don’t understand just because somebody tells you it is a good idea.”