The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, How They Can Help You by John Covert and Todd Sattersten
A Book Corner Review
The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, How They Can Help You
By John Covert and Todd Sattersten
Penguin Group, 2009[powerpress: http://gsbm-med.pepperdine.edu/gbr/Audio/winter2012/BookReview_LeoMallette_100BestBooks.mp3]
One plus one equals two. One: You are reading this book review because you want to hear about a book before you buy it. Plus one: The 100 Best Business Books of All Time is crammed with book reviews and allows you to learn about all those books that you think you should have read or relearn the ones you did read but forgot the reason why it was so valuable at the time. So you like book reviews and this book reviews 100 books; this equals two reasons why you should go buy it.
Covert and Sattersten did a great job of selecting The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. All of us can argue that the Who-ate-my-cheese book or American Samurai book should have been in there, but we didn’t write the book. Give them credit; they did a great job and most of the titles that you’d expect are there—some of these titles only need one word to remind us: Possibility, Discover, EI, Break all the Rules, Flow, Dysfunctions, Goal, Good to Great, HP Way, Excellence, Leading, Lexus/Olive Tree, Naked Economics, Paranoid, Purple Cow, Leap, Reengineering, Closing the Sale, Swim with the Sharks, TPS, Elephants, How to Win Friends, Zag, and many others – both classics and recent.
Sometimes a book review doesn’t give away the whole story. But Covert and Sattersten (as the book’s subtitle says) tell you what the books said, why they matter to today’s businessperson, and how they can help you. Each two- to three-page review is thorough and is followed up by a “Where To Next” paragraph, in which they tell you where to go read about similar topics within the book as well as outside reading.
I gave this book a five-star rating, maybe it should have gotten a 100! This 335-page book was fascinating to read and was an excellent review of many books I’ve read, several that I’ve never heard of, and many that I want to read. I would recommend this book for anyone who might not know what they’ve been missing.
About the Author(s)
Leo Mallette, EdD, provides technical and programmatic support at The Aerospace Corporation. Previously, he worked in system engineering and project management of satellite systems at the Boeing Company for 30 years. He received the BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida and the MBA and Ed.D. (in organizational leadership) degrees from Pepperdine University. He is co-author of the book Writing for Conferences (Greenwood, 2011), co-editor of The SPELIT Power Matrix (CreateSpace, 2007), and author of Images of America: Rancho Mirage (Arcadia Publishing, 2011). Dr. Mallette is a supporting business faculty at Pepperdine University and the University of Phoenix’s doctoral program, and was an Instructor of Engineering at the University of Central Florida. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a member of the advisory board for the Precise Time and Time Interval Conference, and a board member of the Society of Educators and Scholars.
