This page gives short reviews on a larger list of management and economics books, ranked by how good I found them to be. For some of them, there are more detailed writeups, which are linked.
| Author | Title | Ranked | ISBN | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C. S. Forester | Captain Hornblower | ***** | 0140081771 | |
| Learn management from the age of sail. This is just an exemplary book for the Hornblower saga. They all are wonderful fictional historic reading, with lots of details both about the period of the Napoleonic wars and tall ship sailing. My conclusions are here. | ||||
| Sun Tzu | The Art of War | ***** | 0195014766 | |
| A timeless classic about strategy, tactics and warfare. Amazing how much can be said in just a few pages. | ||||
| Miyamoto Musashi | The Book of Five Rings | ***** | 0553351702 | |
| A management classic like Sun Tsu, for those that like the methaphor of fighting for business. Musashi was the best swordsman of his time, and wrote a timeless piece about practice, dedication, simplicity, keeping an open mind and awareness. | ||||
| Ben Bernanke Robert H Frank | Principles of Economics | ***** | 0070618291 | |
| This wonderful book is the best book I read in 2007. It explains the basic principles of economics: how specialization and free exchange of goods in markets create wealth, comparative advantage, sunk and marginal cost, diminishing returns and opportunity cost. It basically turned me into a free market advocate, although of course humans do not behave as rational as those theories would lead you to believe. In the second half it gets a bit dry with macroeconomics, but if you want to learn why interest rates have an impact on inflation and unemplyoment, and what the central banks are doing, it is a start. | ||||
| Jr. Alfred P. Sloan | My Years with General Motors | ***** | 0385042353 | |
| According to Bill Gates probably the single most useful book you can read, if you read only one book on business. Read this book, and understand where all the stuff Drucker wrote came from. Sloan's advise is disguised as a memoir, but other then with Welch's biography, you can understand his ideas by what he described. Sloan was one of the best managers the world has ever seen. He recognized the value of giving employees freedom to act guided by objectives and incentives, introduced organizational structures balancing central policy with decentralization, introduced collecting key operational data, looked ahead to preempt problems and saw opportunities for innovation on a level where it really becomes a bit scary. Amore detailed writeup is here. | ||||
| Peter F. Drucker | The essential Drucker | ***** | 006093574X | |
| Drucker is for management what Tolkien is for Fantasy: everybody else looks just like a bad plagiarist. This wonderful compilation of the essential points in his work was selected by Drucker himself. It was the most insightful, thought provoking book on management for me at the time I first read it. There are so many gems of wisdom in here, about the purpose of business being to create a customer, about management by objectives, about the need for conflict to come to good decisions ... it just goes on. | ||||
| David Allen | Getting Things Done : The Art of Stress-Free Productivity | ***** | 0142000280 | |
| Don't try to think of tasks, your mind is bad in remembering things at the right time, and you'll always feel there is something you should do but are not doing. Control, Record, Review. First, decide what you accept into your life. Second, record it all in one place, so you know it will be taken care of. Third, review your tasks. Decide what to do for each item as you process it: is it actionable? If not, scrap it, file it as reference, or as idea. Does it take less then two minutes? Do it now. Otherwise, record the next physical action. Make to-do lists by environment: out, office, home, etc. Make agenda lists for things you delegate. Use a calendar to record dates only - tasks should go on lists, so you can do them when you have a window of time. Use project notes for larger projects. I got a page with a more detailed synopsis here. | ||||
| Stephen R. Covey | The 7 habits of highly efficient people | ***** | 0671708635 | |
| This is where all those terms like paradigm, proactivity and empowerment stem from. I got a page with the synopsis here. | ||||
| Niccolo Machiavelli | The Prince | ***** | 0553212788 | |
| A classical instruction manual on politics and power. It seems to me not as evil and corrupt as people make it out to be. It simply examines soberly the realistic options for securing power, without considering moral implications. These recommendations could in many cases lead to more stable and less bloody outcomes, then ill-guided desire to make the world a better place. For mergers and takeovers, the advise to make the necessary blood-bath decisively up-front, rather then protract the bleeding is surely correct. Free e-book at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1232. | ||||
| Michael E. Porter | Competitive Strategy | **** | 0684841487 | |
| Porter created the famous five forces model, the reference for large scale strategy. Classic strategies for competition are differentiation and cost leadership, that is either be unique through innovation or access to unique resources, or be cheaper through economies of scale, leading on the experience curve etc. There are five forces or threats that determine how strong your position is: your current competition, substitution, new entrants overcoming barriers to entry, supplier and buyer power. | ||||
| Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Fooled by Randomness | **** | 0812075219 | |
| Could be much shorter, if Taleb would not try to prove how much smarter than everybody else he is. He collected human bias and errors in thinking: People take correlation for causation. They overestimate plastic, imaginable risks and underestimate abstract ones. They ignore the condition in conditional probabilities. They just look at value or probabilty, instead of probability times value for expected results. Anchoring bias: estimates are influenced by a reference point. People are happier earning 60, when others earn 50, then earning 70, when others earn 80. Meaningful developments have a large time scale, daily news are too fine-grained and just measure noise. Loss aversion bias: means losses register twice as strong emotionally as gains. Don't look at your stock too often. Decisions need gut to decide when getting more information is not worth it. Recency bias: thinking things will go on as in the past. Hume, Popper: Theories can only be falsified, never proven. Survivor bias: in any large group there are winners by chance alone, without superior ability and unable to repeat their success. Path dependency bias: how you get to a point influences how you see it - owning a million after poverty feels different than after a billion. Success makes self-assured, radiating security, which females fall for. | ||||
| Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian | Information Rules | **** | 087584863X | |
| An extremely enjoyable book that applies fundamental strategic and economic principles to information goods, without forcing a lot of newly invented lingo down your throat. The core insights are that information goods are expensive to produce, but easy to customize and nearly free to reproduce, so without differentiation markets will drive the price down to the marginal cost near zero. Therfore you should differentiate the hell out of them, via features and matching pricing for different customer groups. There is a tendency for lock-in, when information goods get linked with other systems and users are stuck with them because of high switching costs. Information goods often form a network economy, where goods are more valuable the more people use them, which leads to a winner-takes-all outcome. They also have a lot wonderful case studies and of infromation on how and when to wage standards wars. See details here. | ||||
| Jack Welch and Suzy Welch | Winning | **** | 0060753943 | |
| A well structured overview of his management advice, covering values, corporate culture, hiring, differentiation, firing, strategy, crisis, mergers, budgeting, work/life balance, and dealing with bosses. | ||||
| Peter F. Drucker | The Effective Executive | **** | 0887306128 | |
| Drucker lists five traits: contribution based on strengh, concentration of your time, tracking of how you spend your time, fundamental decisions, well-conducted meetings. I got a page with the synopsis here. | ||||
| Stephen C Lundin and Harry Paul and John Christensen | Fish! | **** | 0340819804 | |
| A one hour motivational read about the power to chose your attitude. Focuses on creating an energized, fun work environment by playfulness, sharing your enjoyment with your customers, and being present by giving your full attention to the person you deal with -- that alone is worth the book. Detailed writeup is here. | ||||
| Tom DeMarco | Der Termin | **** | 3446194320 | |
| A book on software project management, thinly disguised as a novel. According to DeMacro, project management is about four things: 1) Choose the right people 2) Give them the right job 3) Motivate them 4) Support them. The rest, like GANTT charts, are administrivalities. Change is needed for success. People will take risk of change and show initiative only when they don't fear punishment for mistakes. Anger and abuse means people are afraid to fail, to be incompetent. Be fair, honest, open. Care for your people, protect them. Threats destroy trust, can't force people to do the impossible, and must be executed on failure. PEOPLE UNDER PRESSURE DO NOT THINK FASTER. Long term pressure leads to burnout and kills productivity. In hiring trust gut feeling. Have two people at the interview, two guts are better than one. Listen more than you speak. Identify and track risks, cut losses, cancel failed efforts early - it's more effective than optimizing what works. Use already working teams, don't split them. Have a Kassandra, and provide an anonymous way to tell you about problems. A day lost at the start HURTS JUST AS MUCH as at the end. There's always pathological policy, live with it. Build models to quantify your instincts. Measure the size of what you build, to gauge the effort ahead. Improving processes costs time now to pay off in the long run, maybe. Be wary. Rigid processes can eat productivity. Spend your time to understand and make a sound design. Then implementation is swift, debugging short. Ambiguous specs result from conflict of interest. A spec should list all inputs and outputs, and you must be able to understand it. Else it's crap. Negotiation is hard, mediation easier. Don't overstaff, people will get in each others' way. Issue topics before meetings and stick to them. | ||||
| James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras | Built to last | **** | 0060516402 | |
| The predecessor of Good To Great, this book analyzes higly successful companies that survived for a long time, and compares them with unsuccessful ones, to find out what made them great. Some of these insights are: have something to believe in, unchanging values and a core purpose, while your strategies change; specialice in one thing, and try to be the best in the world in this; have larger-then-life goals to energize and give people purpose, if they believe in something, people can achieve amazing things; try out lots of things and keep what works, and have processes in place for this; work to improve things every day, and never stop improving, instead of hoping for a big revolution; have a culture, driven by values, and accept that to succeed people have to fit in cuturally; grow your own managers. He also gives a nice guide how to come up with a company vision, purpose, and values. Like the companion book, is OK, but uses too much lingo, to make obvious insights sound new. | ||||
| Jim Collins | Good to Great | **** | 0066620996 | |
| This book, a blockbuster, goes from good to mediocre. The foundation is great: Collins did a lot of data mining, instead of just promoting his own beliefs. He identified companies that learned to beat the market many times over, and compared them to similar companies, that did not. From this he identified traits for success. These were: personally humble leaders driven to make the company great; get the best people, worry about strategy later; face reality and accept change; find a business model you care about, where you can become the best in the world; use IT to support that model; constant incremental improvement instead of revolution. The bad part is that he invents new terms for these unsurprising facts, as if he found something new, and towards the end of the book all you do is wade through this stuff. | ||||
| Jr. Frederic P. Brooks | The Mythical Man Month | **** | 0201835959 | |
| This is the classical text about software project management with some annotations and the ``No Silver Bullet'' Essay added twenty years later. There seems to be an unspoken law stating that this must be cited in any other book about software projects or any computer book at all, with the following sentence: ``The programmer at wit's end for lack of space can often do best by disentangeling himself from his code, rearing back, and contemplating his data. Representation is the essence of programming.'' But there is much more practical wisdom in it, and it's half-entertaining to read, too. | ||||
| Herb Cohen | You can negotiate anything | **** | 0806508477 | |
| Cohen tells you entertainingly exactly what the title says, and how to go about it. Pretty good. | ||||
| Larry Bossidy and Ram Chandran | Execution | **** | 0609610570 | |
| No, this is not a book about how to kill somebody. Bossidy advocates much of the same values as Welch (after all he learned under him at GE), like facing the truth, asking and listening, ranking and reviewing people, follow-through, and informality. He goes into detail about how to build an strategic and operating plan, pointing out that a great strategy is useless if you do not have the capability to put it to work, or if your try to do too many things to get any of them done. He advocates that you should be immersed into you business day to day, as much as possible. Solid practical advise. Could have been better organized and less repetitive, Points for content, not for clarity. Detailed writeup is here. | ||||
| W. J. King and James K. Skakoon | The unwritten laws of business | **** | 038552126X | |
| A funny title for a book and a wonderful little book, with lots of sound practical advise. I would recommend this for anyone starting out at work afer university. A condensed list of the laws is here. | ||||
| Jon R. Katzenbach and Doughlas K. Smith | The Wisdom of Teams | *** | 0887306764 | |
| According to Katja, who read the whole thing, all the important points are condensed in the first chapter. A team is a group of people without a single leader/decision maker. Teams that work are driven by a performance challenge, a goal they want to achive, not by 'being a team'. To be successful the team members need: complementary skills, a common purpose, common performance goals, and a commonly agreed upon working approach. Also the team members must be mutually accountable for each other: they either succeeed or fail as a team. If they fail, it's not a single scapegoats fault, even if his mistake is the reason, it's the teams' fault for not supporting him. | ||||
| Sandy Weill and Judah S. Kraushaar | The Real Deal | *** | 0446578142 | |
| Sandy weill is the guy who made Citigroup the largest financial institution in the world. According to this biography, he did this by buying on the cheap companies in trouble with good sales channels and customer bases, usually by stock exchange in a kind of merger. Then he cut costs by integrating the back office, streamlined operations and laid off staff, and had them cross-sell. Rinse and repeat. Some of his advise: On goals: Recognize and play on your strengths. Never give in for despair. Dream big. Take risks, and get to the next level. On Acquisitions: They should do one or more of: consolidate business and generate savings on shared functions; add products and diversity enhancing the value offered to customers; add management talent. Only make acquisitions that do not dilute your rate on equity return. On negotiations: avoid pushing for the absolute cheapest deal. Leave some room for the seller to feel good about the transaction, too. Best enter negotiations from a position of strength. On costs: Keep costs under control during good times and keep a strong capital position to be flexible in bad times. One time large investments are OK, but cost day by day must be kept low. No frivolous spending. Speed of action is a great competitive asset. Manage for continuous short term results, and the long term will take care of itself. Use reporting tools that give you real-time information on each businesses' key drivers, so you can identify anomalies early. Contain operating risks - manage day-to-day operations conservatively to have a steady base of recurring earnings. On execution: The CEO must focus on execution. Corporate culture, relations to the outside, corprorate and vision are meaningless if you can't execute. Formality and hierarchy slows decision making. Everybody should think on their feet and express what they believe. If you want to be successful, you need to understand the business. Detailed review is here. | ||||
| Gene Zelazny | Say it with presentations | *** | 0071472894 | |
| Zelazny was the guy at McKinsey responsible for presentation training. This book about holding a presentation and is presenting it's material surprisingly bad. The most interesting point for me was that you should present your take home message first, the evidence later. Much of the rest is about soft areas like using humor, and the advice is wish-wash, a la 'Use humor when it fits; Use humor that matches your personality'. | ||||
| Laurence J. Peter | Die Peter - Pyramide | *** | 3499187159 | |
| Laurence J. Peter is the one who invented the Peter principle (everybody gets promoted up to the level where he is unable to cope). Here he tries to apply that insight to why large organizations develop into bureaucracies, with unsurprising results. It's mostly worth reading for the snappy quotes: "If the first person answering the phone can't answer your question, it's a bureaucracy" -Lyndon B. Johnson. | ||||
| James Surowiecky | The wisdom of crowds. | *** | 0349117071 | |
| A delightful little book about how groups can make better decisions than individuals. They need diversity of opinion, independence, and some aggregation or weighing scheme. The best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not of consensus or compromise. Voting systems or markets serve well to consolidate these conflicting views. Everyone has some private information about reality, and individual errors tend to cancel out. Mixed skill levels in a group can also help good decisions by giving more perspectives. Groups of only strong spend too much time exploiting, and not enough exploring. Herding - copying the behavior or opinions of others (also called group-think) makes them dumber. For yourself, it may be better to follow the crowd then trust your own judgement, but for all, it is better if each decides for himself. Sequential decision making encourages herd behavior, because you observe others' decisions and they influence your own. Speculation, basing your decisions on the expected decisions of others, who do the same, makes groups unstable. It, like herding can lead to bubbles. | ||||
| Roger von Oech | A Whack on the Side of the Head | *** | 0446674559 | |
| This guy tries to make you more creative. The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas (L. Pauling). The premise is: Mental locks block your creativity. Here are ways to breach them: 1. Find the second right answer. It might be better than the obvious one. 2. Brainstorm, forget about logic, imagine and associate, ask 'What if?'. 3. Play. 4. Explore into areas where you are not a specialist, if you have a trail leading there. 5. Break the rules. Chances are, there is no good reason for them anymore. 6. Allow ambiguity. 7. Do not be afraid of errors. Learn from them, and improve. Finally, judge and organize the results of your creative process. If you came up with a good idea, put work into it and fight for it - since everything new will hit a lot of opposition. This book is chock full of nice quotes, with a series of Heraklitus aphorisms at the end. | ||||
| Herbert E. Meyer | Real World Intelligence | *** | 093516605X | |
| This is an interesting little book about what intelligence (in the sense of the CIA) really is: selecting what needs to be known, collecting raw information, transforming it into knowledge, generating the finished product: a report and finally distribute the product to the policy makers. | ||||
| William J. Brown and Raphael C. Malveau and Hays W. McCormick III and Thomas J. Mowbray | Anti Patterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures and Projects in Crisis | *** | 0471197130 | |
| Joan Magretta | Basic Managment | *** | 3423340649 | |
| An introduction to management ideas by a journalist. Good for getting an overview, and setting up your framework. Looks more into the relation of company to the market then into making you effective as an individual or people issues. | ||||
| Dieter Brandes | Konsequent einfach | *** | 3453180720 | |
| What made ALDI, a German food discounter, so successful? Brandes, who was a director there, thinks: a practical mission that could be acted upon at all levels and that could be understood by everyone - "quality for the lowest price by cutting costs". This lead to a culture of asceticism, attention to detail and continuous, small improvements. Focus, a small array of non-redundant products. Non-overlapping responsibilities, and control feedback to make sure good work is appreciated and slackers weeded out. Decentralization and minimal need for communication. Logistics were just "where something is missing, we have to put something". This also makes good coding: knowing what to code, focus on doing one thing well, continually improving, modularisation and decoupling, error checking. Nice book, sometimes a little raving. They never hired consultants, or PR agencies. | ||||
| Sam Walton | Wal-Mart | *** | 3478386608 | |
| This book about the making of Wal-Mart by it's founder Sam Walton focuses on the earlier years. Walton says the reason for his success is that he wanted to do it and he kept going at it. You need to set ever higher goals, or you have nothing to shoot for. And you may not become complacent with what you achieved, no matter how much it is. Otherwise, he would have stopped after he had a few grocery stores. He also praises hard work and team spirit. His list of 10 rules for success contains challenging conventional wisdom (a.k.a crazy ideas or swimming against the stream) and having fun. And he shows that snooping around and taking all the good ideas you see from your competitors is effective. | ||||
| Mark H. McCormack | What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School | *** | 0553345834 | |
| McCormack is street-smart, and unfortunately that is not something you'll be able to learn from a book. This one contains lots of keen observations about people and their behavior. Be awake, and keep your eyes and ears open. | ||||
| Janet Lowe | Jack Welch speaks | ** | 0471413364 | |
| A bit dated, the interviews being done before Welch stepped down. Typical soundbites of Welch, some quite good, like 'Tell people the truth, because they know the truth anyways'. Better get 'Winning' instead. | ||||
| Martin John Yate | Hiring the best | ** | 1593374038 | |
| A guide on interviewing from the company's perspective. Lots of typical questions. Interestingly, the same author has a book on the candidates view in Knock 'em Dead. | ||||
| Peter Hobbs | Professionelles Projektmanagement | ** | 3478860024 | |
| A slim introduction. It says some of what you need, but by far not enough. Clearly structured. | ||||
| Lawrence R. O'Leary | Interviewing for the Decisionmaker | ** | 0882295128 | |
| And older book, with a little dusty, ponderous style. Still, there are some sound principles laid out. Not as flashy then the fat books that field hundreds of questions, but still OK. | ||||
| Martin John Yate | Knock 'em Dead | ** | 1593374526 | |
| A guide on interviewing from the candidate's perspective. Lots of typical questions. Interestingly, the same author has a book on the companies view in Hiring the Best. | ||||
| David Packard | The HP Way | ** | 0060845791 | |
| Another memoir style book I read on the premise that the best person to learn something about what works in management and business is a highly successful manager or businessman. There are the usual suspects, like management by walking around, values (here: economic, useful technological contribution; quality; trust in and respect for people; organic growth), putting resources on the best opportunities, listening to customers, incentive compensation. There are also some cute ideas, like 5-year vintage charts, the engineer-next-bench-wants-one test of product desirability, turning down ideas by enthusiasm-inquisition-decision, 'Don't try to take a fortified hill, especially if the army on top is bigger than your own.' and 'More companies die from indigestion then starvation'. Maybe because of the fame of Hewlett and Packard as managers, I had expected a bit more. Separate page here. | ||||
| Jack Welch and John A. Byrne | Jack: Straight from the Gut | ** | 0446528382 | |
| If you're looking for Welch's management insights, this is the wrong book. Get 'Winning' instead. | ||||
| Tom Peters | The Pursuit of Wow! | * | 0679755551 | |
| A management and self-improvement book. I ran into Peters' name time and again when it came to management writers and I thought when so many people cite this guy, he may have some smart stuff to tell and do it entertainingly to boot. Most of the content of this book (which happened to be available at my local library), is rather common wisdom. I've read part of it more to the point in Dale Carnegie, too. I found it disappointing. | ||||
