The Summer Reading List
Online bookstore All Top Books has done a little survey for BNET on where it sells the most business books in the UK and what they are buying.
The south east of England's by far the biggest business buyer, accounting for 40 per cent of All Top Books' business sales.
Its top sellers are:
- Butterworth's Employment Law Handbook
- Tolley's Employment Handbook
- Tolly Health and Safety at Work
So what are the recommended reads for the business-obsessed? Businessweek's compiled a list of MBA-friendly favourites that includes classics such as Philip Kotler's Ten Deadly Marketing Sins, Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. It's worth a look.
We've added seven more suggestions that are sufficiently riveting to count as holiday reads:
- The Last Tycoons: the Secret History of Lazard Freres by William Cohan. If you've not already read it, it's probably the closest you'll get to a potboiler -- assuming you've read Barbarians at the Gate.
- What Management Is by Joan Magretta, a tiny classic that is all about management but reads like a breeze.
- Outsmart! How to Do What Your Competitors Can't by Jim Champy, for inspirational ideas on how to inject organisational change into any business.
- The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organisations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World by Peter Senge. The sixth discipline, if you like, and not as heavy as its title sounds.
- We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity by Charles Leadbeater, a fun read about the emergence of open source everything. (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is another, if this is your topic.)
- 50 Management Ideas You Really Need to Know by Edward Russell-Walling. A reader-friendly and jaunty compendium of management ideas with historical red herrings to help the medicine go down.
- Crunch by Jared Bernstein. Marginal Revolution slates its too-populist tone. Enough said. If you're a bit more economics friendly, try Tim Harford's The Logic of Life: Uncovering The New Economics of Everything. One reader cut through it in a weekend.