Christensen shook up the business world with his insight that paying close attention to customers can hurt if your company is blindsided by a "disruptive technology."
16. Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, by Thomas A. Stewart (1997)
This book is an unanswerable argument for valuing your company's collective knowledge as much as the contents of its warehouses and factories. Stewart explains with lucidity and wit how to create, wrangle, and exploit intangible assets.
17. The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up, by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham (2008)
Brodsky and Burlingham write Inc.'s Street Smarts column; The Knack similarly brings readers into the thick of running an entrepreneurial business.
18. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, by Yvon Chouinard (2005)
An eloquent manifesto for the socially and environmentally conscious business. The founder of Patagonia may be a reluctant businessman, but he is also an unusually thoughtful one.
19. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don't, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2007)
The Heath brothers identify qualities of memorable and effective ideas wherever they occur, in one of the most useful and entertaining marketing books to come along in years.
20. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, by Michael Lewis (1999)
Follow along as Jim Clark, the zillionaire founder of Silicon Graphics, chases after his next paradigm-shifting venture. A fascinating profile of the beyond-type-A entrepreneur and a wry anatomy of Silicon Valley in the boom years.
21. Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, by Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg (1996)
Corporate culture is a squishy term, until you look at Southwest Airlines -- and suddenly the possibilities become clear.
22. Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy (1983)
The Web has changed how things are sold, but it hasn't changed what sells. The founder of Ogilvy & Mather emphasizes research, brands, and big ideas. On copywriting, he's still king. And he always makes excellent company.
23. On Competition, by Michael Porter (2008)
Before you choose a strategy -- hell, before you choose an industry -- consult Porter's greatest hits. He distinguishes between operational effectiveness, which means doing things well (think Japan circa 1985), and competitive strategy, which means doing things differently or doing different things (think entrepreneurs circa forever).
24. Personal History, by Katharine Graham (1997)
We have heard several women CEOs cite this memoir by the former owner of The Washington Post as the most important tome in their leadership libraries. Coming into herself as a leader, Graham is an unexpected yet courageous exemplar of the socially seismic second half of the 20th century.
25. Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang (1997)
Schultz's humble origins, his succumbing to a passion for a product, and his ongoing pursuit of servant leadership are genuinely inspirational.
26. Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, by Bo Burlingham (2005)
For decades, company owners thought they had two choices: accept perpetual mom-and-pop-ism or pursue torrid growth. Small Giants posits a third option -- be modest in scale but also an extraordinary employer, vendor, or community citizen.
27. Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder (1981)
This Pulitzer Prize–winning account of a team of Data General engineers rushing to complete a next-generation computer was published the year IBM introduced its PC. Back then, the technologists and work methods described must have seemed like exotic birds. Today, they are familiar, but Soul remains a bravura piece of journalism and foundational history of the tech sector.
28. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)
For anyone curious about the fundamentals of modern economic theory, Smith's synthesis of earlier ideas laid the groundwork for laissez-faire capitalism. As we struggle with self-interest run amuck and debates over government intervention in business, Wealth deserves a revisit.
29. What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business, by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone (2002)
We love the authors' belief in management's role as the guarantor of everyone's well-being and their refusal to treat case study subjects as paragons. And we admire their humble goals: "You will…understand what management is capable of on a very good day. And on those bad days when things are going wrong, you will be far more likely to figure out what needs to be fixed."
30. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, by James Surowiecki (2004)
Surowiecki's exploration of the power of group intelligence grows ever more relevant. Technology makes this entertaining work of behavioral economics dangerous to ignore.
