10 business books worth reading cover to cover (and why)

1. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — This is a thought-provoking book for any reader and is a must-read for business leaders who will benefit from Taleb’s views on risk management. Taleb uses mathematics, classical thinking and his experience as a Wall Street trader to examine why we underestimate the probability of fat-tailed events (like the events that caused the Great Recession). He calls these rare events “Black Swans” (a term from his previous book, The Black Swan), and he urges the reader to embrace their inevitability by doing things that improve as randomness increases.
2. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight — It’s hard to imagine that a company as large as Nike was once a tiny 1 person startup operating out of a house in Oregon. Shoe Dog is a touching memoir that gives you a raw and authentic look into the founding story of Nike and its rise to the legendary status it holds today.
3. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone — Everyone knows that Amazon started off as a small online bookseller at the dawn of the internet age. What they don’t know is how Bezos transformed Amazon from a book-seller to the 5th biggest company in the world (by market cap). This book will give you a really good idea of how that happened.
4. Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis — This is the book that launched Michael Lewis’ writing career and it’s an entertaining read. Lewis chronicles his time on Wall Street as a bond trader at Solomon Brothers and sheds light on some of the less admirable qualities of the finance industry.
5. When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein — This is an excellent book about capital markets and how treacherous they can be when things turn against you. Long Term used advanced mathematical models to drive their investment strategy, and they saw returns over 40% in the first few years they were operating. But in 1998 things went horribly wrong, Long Term lost $4.4B and everything came crashing down.
6. High Output Management by Andy Grove — Great book with practical lessons about how to be an excellent manager and act as a lever on your organization’s productivity. Grove passed away in early 2016, but he leaves us with one of the best management books of all time.
7. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman — Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate, has packaged decades of research about how we think into an engaging and accessible book. Kahneman breaks our two main ways of thinking into two categories — System 1 and System 2. He uses simple examples to explain the differences in the two systems and what those differences mean for our everyday lives.
8. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us Allby Tom Kelley and David Kelley — Helpful book that gives people who don’t traditionally think of themselves as creative actionable advice for building their “creative confidence”. As the Amazon summary of the book notes, the authors “[draw] on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world’s top companies” to provide the reader with numerous real-world examples of people and organizations unlocking their creative potential.
9. Who Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin Roth — Roth, co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics, looks at the dynamics at play in markets where price is not the determining factor for allocation of a good or service. Roth designed the market for medical school residencies and the market for kidneys in the US healthcare system among other markets, and he’s summed up his learnings in a book that’s accessible to all audiences.
10. Money Masters of Our Time by John Train — Train’s informative book includes chapters about Warren Buffet, Benjamin Graham, T. Rowe Price and Peter Lynch among other famous investors. Each chapter provides background on the investor’s life as well as commentary on their unique investment strategy.

Do you have other great business books to recommend? Add them to the comments section!