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222 pages
ISBN 9780060845797 Published Jan. 2006
HarperCollins Publishers
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Posted Aug. 5, 2011 4:06 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
In our The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, we included a chapter of recommended biographies. Jack has always championed the form as a valid way to learn valuable business lessons, not just as good entertainment. In the opening of the chapter, we explained:
How did they do it? That is the question we all want to ask when we meet someone famous or wealthy. We want to mimic them, thinking that if we just follow their footsteps we'll arrive at the same place. But, as Mark Twain said, "History rhymes; it does not repeat." Biographies provide a direction and a context so we can better plot our own course."
In that chapter, we included these 7 biographies:
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow;
My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.;
The HP Way by David Packard;
Personal History by Katharine Graham;
Moments of Truth by Jan Carlzon;
Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey;
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson.
Today, Fast Company came out with their own list of recommended biographies. They chose:
Mary Kay: Miracles Happen by Mary Kay Ash;
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
by Yvon Chouinard;
Direct from Dell: Strategies that Revolutionized an Industry; by Michael Dell and Catherine Fredman;
Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca with William Novak;
Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy;
The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company by David Packard;
Body and Soul: Profits with Principles, the Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick & the Body Shop by Anita Roddick;
Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang;
Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story by Sam Walton and John Huey
Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond by Thomas J. Watson and Peter Petre;
Jack: Straight from the Gut by Jack Welch and John A. Byrne
While our recommendations are quite dissimilar (we only have two matching titles, The HP Way and Sam Walton), some of these books (the Ogilvy and Watson) made our original shortlist, and we also write a bit in the new paperback version of The 100 Best coming out in November 2011 about the game-changing effect that Iococca's book had on the business book genre.
Looking at the sub-genre of business biographies as a whole, unlimited lessons can be learned from the lives of others, and we are privileged to be let into the lives of these masters of business through their books.
Business Book Humiliations
Posted Aug. 3, 2010 3:43 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Penguin's Portfolio imprint specializes in business books, and their Portfolio Javelin blog ("Business, Business Books, and the Business of Books") is a great read for any of us business book geeks. Yesterday, Will Weisser, Vice President and Associate Editor of Portfolio, wrote an entry inspired by a post in the Guardian's blog in which the author, Robert McCrum, confessed, despite his education and exposure to great books, that he had never read Middlemarch by George Eliot (if you too have not read Middlemarch, I highly recommend remedying that this summer--it's one of my favorites.) McCrum then invites readers to share their book humiliations by listing the books that they regret never having read.
In his post, Weisser agrees to play along, but specifies that he has "focused on the business category for 15 years but still haven’t read some of the most acclaimed and influential business books, the ones we use as benchmarks and role models."
Weisser's list of regrets:
Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart
In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen
Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
The HP Way by David Packard
Then he was kind enough to mention our book, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, as a great resource for determining which books you've missed out on. (When preparing the "lost chapter" of The 100 Best, we added Barbarians at the Gate by Burrough and Helyar, and it would be the perfect book to take on vacation yet this summer.)
Intrigued by this challenge, I posed the question to Jack, our in-house encyclopedia of business books, what Business Book Humiliations he may still have. He replied that Michael Porter (author of Competitive Advantage and Competitive Strategy comes to mind. Personal History by Katharine Graham was Dylan's choice. If I had to choose one, it would be Men and Women of the Corporation by Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
What's your business book humiliation, the one business book you most regret never having read?
