The Best Business Books of 2008

I love the year-end lists, like the year’s best movies, the year’s best books.  And in the latest Business Week, books editor Hardy Green gives his take on the best business books of 2008.  (Read his article here).  

Karl and I have both weighed in with our favorite books of the ten+ years we have done the First Friday Book Synopsis.  Mine was the terrific book by Twyla Tharpe, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life.  By the way, you can watch the televised Kennedy Center Honors on December 30, where Twyla Tharpe joins Barbra Streisand, Morgan Freeman, George Jones, and two members of The Who, Peter Townshend and Roger Daltrey, as this year’s recipients.   

But to name the best books – this is a different task than naming my favorite book.  In both categories, I might go with a new book. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers is the first book I have read in ages more than a month in advance of our event.  I could not put it down, and was saddened when I completed it – I wanted more.  It literally drew me to the next page, and then the next, and the next.  It really is, as its subtitle suggests, The Story of Success.  And we learn that success is more than the individual effort of the person we label as a success.  Success is a group effort, dependent on time, place, opportunity, along with work ethic and skill and intelligence and… 

Here is the list from Business Week, divided into two groups — the books we have done or have already scheduled for presentations at our monthly First Friday Book Synopsis, and those that have not been chosen.

We will have presented these four of the ten by the end of March, 2009:



Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins) by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Dan Ariely.

The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation (Crown Business) by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley and management consultant Ram Charan, 



Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Thomas L. Friedman. 



Outliers: The Story of Success by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown). 




Here are the ones we have not done.  



Charles R. Morris’ The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (PublicAffairs), 



Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam) 



The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (The Penguin Press) by strategy consultant Charles D. Ellis. 



Hell’s Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine (Metropolitan Books) by Diarmuid Jeffreys. 



Michael Heller’s The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (Basic Books). 



Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau) by former Wall Street Journal writer Leslie T. Chang. 

Business books, like other books, fall into numerous categories. Karl Krayer and I tend to not select what we call “finance” books, and we seldom do history or biography.  We tend to seek books that deal with these issues:  how can companies perform better, how can leaders perform better, how can we all think better. 

I don’t doubt that we miss key books, but I am also confident that if we simply put into practice the strategies and principles that we discover in the books we choose, our lives and our companies will all be more effective.