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.
