Business & Entrepreneurship books worth reading

14 books I've read in Business & Entrepreneurship, rated and reviewed honestly.

All History Technology & Programming Business & Entrepreneurship Marketing & SEO Novels Psychology Self-Development

Books in this genre

Competitive Strategy

by Michael E. Porter · 1980

The academic foundation almost every later strategy book (including several in this list) is reacting to or building on — the Five Forces framework alone changed how industries are analyzed.

Freakonomics

by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner · 2005

Popularized the idea that incentives explain almost everything, using genuinely surprising data-driven arguments — the sumo-wrestling-cheating chapter alone justifies the book.

The Everything Store

by Brad Stone · 2013

The best outside account of how Amazon actually got built — unauthorized, which is exactly why it's more useful than a founder memoir would be.

Shoe Dog

by Phil Knight · 2016

A founder memoir that actually reads like a memoir — Knight's account of nearly losing Nike a dozen times over is candid about how close-run and unglamorous the whole thing was.

Blue Ocean Strategy

by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne · 2005

A useful, over-cited framework for escaping head-to-head competition by making the competition irrelevant — most valuable for the four-actions grid, not the buzzword.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy

by Richard Rumelt · 2011

The clearest existing definition of what a strategy actually is — a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action — and a ruthless catalogue of the fluff that gets mistaken for one.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

by Ben Horowitz · 2014

The least sanitized account of running a company under existential pressure — layoffs, near-bankruptcy, firing a friend — written by someone who actually did those things.

Thinking in Systems

by Donella Meadows · 2008

Complex problems rarely come from a single cause; they emerge from interactions, feedback loops, incentives and system structures.

Principles

by Ray Dalio · 2017

Better decisions come from turning experience into explicit principles and using them as repeatable decision-making systems.

The Innovator's Dilemma

by Clayton Christensen · 1997

Successful companies can become vulnerable because the practices that make them successful today can prevent them from responding to disruptive technologies tomorrow.

Good to Great

by Jim Collins · 2001

Long-term organizational excellence tends to come from disciplined people, disciplined thinking and disciplined execution rather than spectacular short-term decisions.

Zero to One

by Peter Thiel & Blake Masters · 2014

A good book about building businesses that are genuinely different rather than merely better than the competition. Some of Thiel's views are stated more absolutely than they deserve, but it is valuable for thinking about monopoly, innovation and competitive advantage.

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries · 2011

Build–Measure–Learn is still one of the most useful frameworks for building a product. Its strength is that it insists on learning from the market instead of guessing — though it doesn't fit every business equally well.

The Wealth of Nations

by Adam Smith · 1776

More than an economics book — one of the foundational texts for understanding markets, the division of labour, productivity and the formation of the modern economy. Reading it in full is not easy, but its historical and intellectual value is immense.

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