It’s not worth reading bad books, but good, concise business books can be worth thousands of times the price of the book. Here are the books I’ve found to be worth thousands of dollars. My list is for entrepreneurs, although they can be useful for anyone in business. There are hundreds of great books, so I’ve been as stingy as possible in listing the ones I’ve found the most influential.

The Art of Beginning

• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Shunryu Suzuki) – The inspiration for the title of this blog: the thrill of always beginning. It’s not even slightly a business book, but rather about things like understanding how to enjoy life with the newness of a child. Most books on “Zen” are utter crap, worse than reading nothing at all about it. This one is great.

Marketing

• Guerilla Marketing – How to spend the least money on marketing for the greatest effect! Lately everyone is getting on the online marketing and social media bandwagons, but this is the book for people bootstrapping a typical new business.
• Purple Cow – The most important modern concept in marketing: making your product itself your marketing focus. Strangely that makes it an interesting response to Naomi Klein’s No Logo.

Working Effectively

• The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People – Doing the right thing, the right way.
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity – ‘Nuff said! This book and Allen’s methods are legendary for a good reason. And if you’re a Mac user looking to implement these principles, I personally recommend OmniFocus, although I’ve also heard good things about Things.

People – Networking and Getting Along

• Never Eat Alone (Keith Ferrazzi) – It reads like a modern version of the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People (see the Oldies section), but with more emphasis on the networking side. Similarly to Carnegie’s book, a big emphasis is on things that ultimately make you a better person. Ferrazzi emphasizes that the most valuable networks are created by consistently trying to find ways to help other people.

Building a Company

• The E-Myth Revisited – How to be an entrepreneur, not your own employee. While it’s a little focused on making the next big McDonalds rather than the next Google, that’s a good thing for those of us starting non-tech businesses.
• Built to Last – What makes great companies great. An absolute must-read.
• Bulldog: Spirit of the New Entrepreneur – Great pep-talk and getting-through-it book by someone who’s actually been there, in the trenches. Fun stories about renting office space for the day to seem bigger to a potential client, and so on!
• Founders at Work (Jessica Livingstone) – Really inspiring interviews with founders (and some early employees) of some of the most famous and successful startups.
• One Up on Wall Street (Peter Lynch) – Investment book with sound business advice. Peter Lynch’s investment approach was a lot like Warren Buffet’s, but modified to run risk-averse mutual funds. What I got from this book was a good idea of what makes a business a sound investment. Lynch writes as an outside investor, but it’s great advice for an entrepreneur. One interesting point was about how many of the best businesses don’t sell technology, they use it, since the cost of any technology goes down over time.

Negotiating

• Getting to Yes – The negociation bible: negotiating in business and life through win-win
• The Only Negociating Guide You’ll Ever Need – Well, not exactly. Read after Getting to Yes.

Oldies But Goodies

• Popcorn Report – Surf the true trends, skip the fads. This is one of those great business books that is fading from memory, but that was truly influential when it came out. Some of the trends it describes are no longer as current as they were (although some ideas have only just started to appear, such as Vitamin Water). But main value of the book was in the ideas about how to identify long-lasting trends and to align your business with them.
• In Search of Excellence – Awesome, kind of the “Built to Last” of the 80’s. This book has had a huge effect on my views of business and entrepreneurship, especially understanding the importance of small teams and the art of fostering innovation, aka. “intrapreneurship” within a company. Reading this book help me understand some of the mistakes of a previous company I started (GDSAF), mistakes I’m working hard to avoid with Swing Dynamite. While exciting in some parts, it’s a bit of a dry read in others, probably a relic of those days when business books tried to seem like textbooks. I read the book after it had already become “old” in the world of business books, and that’s precisely why it’s worth reading: because it’s one of the few books that has stood the test of time.
• How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie) – This is one of the most time-tested books related to business, it’s about the art of getting along with people.