Read these books to be inspired in your business.

Business Books — Some of the most powerful business magnates in the world are avid readers. Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates are all self-proclaimed bookworms who attribute their success to reading. Billionaire Warren Buffett is said to read about 500 pages per day.

If some of the most successful people in the world credit their success to something as simple as reading, then why wouldn’t you give it a try? Check out these business books and get to rocking your world.

Business Books for Professional Development

Business Adventures by John Brooks

You have to have the right people on your team to successfully plan, implement, and carry out short- and long-term goals. The way team members and leaders react in both times of success and hardship will make or break their companies. 

Bill Gates calls Business Adventures (which was a gift from Warren Buffet, by the way) one of the best business books he has ever read. 

The book tells the crisis and triumph of several prominent companies, including Ford Motor Company’s Edsel disaster, the rise of Xerox, and the GE and Texas Gulf Sulphur scandals. Brooks also details the stock market crash in 1962 and the chaos that ensued on Wall Street. 

Business Adventures is a must-read for anyone who is currently running, or aspires to run, a resilient business.

Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott

If you’re looking for a lighter read that provides applicable information on how to be a successful boss and colleague, then this New York Times Bestseller is for you. Scott uses her own experiences at Google, Apple, and other tech companies to show how to be a respected leader and encourage your team to do their best work. 

Radical Candor shows readers how to build strong relationships in a work environment, create a culture of feedback, shape a connected team, and achieve goals everyone can be excited about. Scott is engaging, humorous, and provides readers with entertaining illustrations throughout the book. 

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

There are plenty of companies out there that are considered successful. They may have good investors, a solid group of promoters who love their brand and make enough money to sustain their existence. But what about the companies that are really killing it? Raking in the cash and growing exponentially in all forms? How did they get to where they are? How did they go from good to great?

Jim Collins answers those questions in this intriguing read. He organizes a 5-year experiment to find out the common characteristics of 28 successful companies that made that leap from good to great. 

You’ll have to read Good to Great to discover his findings, however, Collin’s said at the end of his experiment: “The key concepts discerned in the study fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” 

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

An international bestseller and the winner of more than five notable awards, Thinking Fast and Slow takes a hard look at two ways that humans think, which Kahneman calls systems. According to the author, system 1 is “fast, emotional, and intuitive.” System 2 is a bit slower, more deliberate, and logical. By understanding these systems, he tells readers the ways we can take information and use it to shape our personal and work-related decisions. 

There are certain aspects of the two systems that should be focused on or avoided based on the environment and situation. Thinking Fast and Slow takes you through practical techniques that will help you uncover best practices in all situations.

By understanding how we all think, we can successfully lead and help the people around us.

More Books

Reading entrepreneurial books can evoke creativity and inspiration. Personal development is key to creating a successful life and business.

Want more? Here are a few other notable books you should consider:

• Den of Thieves
• Pivot
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
• Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader
• Live It, Love It, Earn It: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom
• Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
• Imagine: How Creativity Works
• The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
• Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business
• Steve Jobs
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
• Tools of Titans
• Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
• Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online

The Top Business Podcasts You Need to Be Listening To

By Leslie Radford