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Posted April 13, 2010 3:54 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Business narratives took home the Pulitzer Prize in two separate categories this year—Biograghy and History.
If you're interested in more business histories and biographies, check out Jack's recent review of Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West by Stephen Fried.
Amazon's Best of 2009
Posted Dec. 4, 2009 6:11 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
Amazon does an interesting thing every year, putting their best selling books in each genre on the same page as their editors' pick so you can easily compare the two.
I am sure that, were I an author, I'd hope to see my name on the bestsellers list. It would mean that I had not only done well financially for the year but, more importantly, that my book had made it into the hands of more readers—my ideas into the minds of more people.
That said, as a reader I always look at the editors' list first. I don't know who Amazon's editors actually are—come to think of it, the only person I know works for Amazon is Jeff Bezos—but I'm guessing that, like us, they spend their days at work poring over the many books that come across their desks, and they've probably become pretty damn good at picking which ones they're going to take home and focus on. There are a lot of books every year that will never see the light of a bestsellers list—that will never catch the popular eye—that nonetheless contain provoking insights for thought leaders and have a greater long-term effect on our lives than a flash-in-the-pan bestseller.
Ideally, of course, you'd make both lists. Congratulations to Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the authors of Animal Spirits, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, on that feat.
Here are the complete lists in Amazon's Business & Investing category for 2009:
The customer favorites:
- House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan, Doubleday
- The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times by Martin D. Weiss, John Wiley & Sons
- Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods, Regnery Press
- Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan: Keeping Your Money Safe & Sound by Suze Orman, Spiegel & Grau
- The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History by Harry S. Dent, Free Press
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press
- Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press
- How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins, HarperCollins
- Strengths-Based: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Gallup Press
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, Workman Publishing Company
The editors' list:
- The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox, HarperBusiness
- Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett, Free Press
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press
- How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Connors & Tom Smith, Portfolio
- Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher, Penguin Press
- In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel, Crown Business
- Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith, John Wiley & Sons
- Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press
- SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Crown Business
- Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod, Portfolio
Other notable editors' picks are T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt published by Penguin Press, winner of the NBA in nonfiction and put in the Biographies & Memoirs category by Amazon's editors, and Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, published by Metropolitan Books, which was the number one editors' pick in the History category.
Other customer favorites include Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed and The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough, both published by Penguin Press, and This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Kenneth S. Rogoff and Carmen M Reinhart and published by Princeton University Press. All of these were in the History category.
To delve into the lists more, head on over to Amazon's Best of 2009.
strategy + business Best Books of 2009
Posted Nov. 25, 2009 4:52 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
The strategy + business annual books list is always one of the finest and most anticipated of the year. They get really smart and talented people who know how to pick 'em, and have them write (always highly intelligent and insightful) essays on their category—and, of course, the books in it. I've listed the picks below, but it really is worth heading over to strategy + business for the essays. (The links to the individual essays are in the headings below.)
Clive Crook picks the best books on The Meltdown:
- In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic by David Wessel, Crown Business
- Financial Shock: Global Panic and Government Bailouts—How We Got Here and What Must Be Done to Fix It by Mark Zandi, FT Press*mdash;2nd edition
- Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis by John B. Taylor, Hoover Institution Press
- Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett, Free Press
- House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan,
- A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression by Richard A. Posner, Harvard University Press
- Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America by Gerald F. Davis, Oxford University Press
Charles Handy picks the Leadership books:
- The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream amidst Global Financial Chaos by Kenneth Hopper & William Hopper, I. B. Tauris & Company—revised edition
- Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman & James O’Toole with Patricia Ward Biederman, Jossey-Bass
- Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help by Edgar H. Schein, Berrett-Koehler
- Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders by Alan Deutschman, Portfolio
- Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement by C. Julia Huang, Harvard University Press
Phil Rosenzweig picks the books on Strategy:
- The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property by Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt, Portfolio
- Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management: Organizing for Innovation and Growth by David J. Teece, Oxford University Press
- Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse by Malcolm S. Salter, Harvard University Press
Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna take on Globalization:
- The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World Is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China by Ben Simpfendorfer, Palgrave Macmillan
- Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation by Nandan Nilekani, Penguin Press
- India’s Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking On the World by Nirmalya Kumar, with Pradipta K. Mohapatra and Suj Chandrasekhar, Harvard Business Press
- The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing by Ian Bremmer & Preston Keat, Oxford University Press
- Riches Among the Ruins: Adventures in the Dark Corners of the Global Economy by Robert P. Smith with Peter Zheutlin, AMACOM
Judith F. Samuelson picks the Management books:
- The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath by Geoff Colvin, Portfolio
- Managing by Henry Mintzberg, Berrett-Koehler
- Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life by John C. Bogle, Wiley
- The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman, Doubleday
Catharine P. Taylor finds the best books on Marketing:
- Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel, Portfolio
- Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, Hyperion
- The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It by John Gerzema and Ed Lebar, Jossey-Bass
Steven Levy looks at the best books on Technology:
- Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin, Random House
- Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig, Penguin
- Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg, Crown
James O'Toole picks the best Biographies:
- John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves, Overlook
- The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles, Knopf
- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, Bantam
As Theodore Kinni writes in the introduction to this year's essays:
This year’s best business books help us understand current conditions and chart a secure course forward. With luck, next year’s best books will offer similar insight into a recovery of historic proportions.
You can read the full feature here.
We've been following this list since 2003. The previous years' lists are below.
2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008
The First Tycoon: The Epic Winner of the NBA's Nonfiction Prize
Posted Nov. 19, 2009 5:34 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
- Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook by David M. Carroll, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species by Sean B. Carroll, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin, Metropolitan Books
- The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor, Princeton University Press
All of the finalists, in all categories, were interviewed for these awards, and The Believer's reviews editor, Meehan Crist, interviewed those in the nonfiction category. Here is a little taste of that interview:
MC: What questions drove you as you worked on The First Tycoon? In other words, what was it that you hoped to better understand by writing it?
TJS: My interest in both the individual life and the historical context drove my work on Commodore Vanderbilt (as he was known). I wanted to understand the mind and personality of someone who clawed his way from the bottom to the top. I was also interested in the effects of that personality, and those ambitions, on his family. And I tried to grasp what Vanderbilt’s career could tell us about the making of the modern United States in the broadest sense. How did he help to shape the American economy—our ideals of equality and opportunity—our arguments over the role of government, and our economic imagination? I began to see his career as part of a great transformation: the abstraction of economic reality, with the rise of paper currency, corporations, securities, and financial markets. This invisible architecture of commerce—which we live in today—troubled many Americans, who were accustomed to a tangible economy of precious metals, physical property, and human beings.
Head on over to the National Book Foundation Website to see the finalists and winners in the other categories and read more of the interview(s).
BusinessWeek's Summer Reading '09
Posted July 28, 2009 2:46 p.m. by todd-sattersten
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog
We know summer is already starting to wane, but we haven't linked to Business Week's recommending reading for the season. Having recommended quite of few of these, we think this is a great list.
- Rubies in the Orchard by Lynda Resnick with Francis Wilkinson
- Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki
- Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: Managing in a Downturn by Ram Charan
- The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles
- How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
- The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers by Keith McFarland
- In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules by Stacy Perman
