12 Must Read Business Books

Here's the Book Rapper 12 Must Read Business Books for April 2009...

Good to Broke: Why some companies completely mess things up and others don’t
Jim Collins

The Zero Hour Work Week: How to spend your time waiting for the Post-Global Financial Meltdown recovery
Timothy Ferriss

Book Yourself Silly: The fastest, easiest and most reliable system for getting more work than you know what to do with at prices you can’t possibly make a living from
Michael Port

The One-Minute Managers Guide to Wasting Time on Facebook
Ken Blanchard and Mark Zuckerberg

Tipping Points for Blinking Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell

Purple, Spotted Cows with Yellow Stripes, Football Boots and Long Tails
Seth Godin and Chris Anderson

The L Myth: Why most bosses don’t have a bloody clue about Leadership and what to do about it
Michael Gerber

The Vista Story: How I became addicted to my Apple Mac
Bill Gates
(Gates tells the real reason he quit as CEO of Microsoft.)

Feigned Optimism: How to fake interest in your current job until you get your next one
Martin Seligman

Out of My Whole New Mind: How my right-brain took over from my left-brain
Daniel Pink

The Hitchhikers Guide to your next Job Interview
Douglas Adams
(Includes a bonus chapter on taking the bus.)

Cheatonomics – How to bankrupt your company through Accounting Fraud
Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron

Let me know which ones we should RAP as our next book.

The Five Most Important Questions

Just finished reading Peter Drucker's The Five Most Important Questions.

It reminds me of an old story…
A business executive returns to college to meet up with his favourite professor who is approaching retirement age.
The exec arrives a little early and sits in on the last part of the professor’s lecture.
Later over coffee, the executive says to the professor, “After all these years, you’re still presenting the same old lectures…”
And the professor replies, “Ah, yes. The basic questions for anyone in business remain the same, it’s just that the answers have changed.”

Drucker’s book is interesting because he died some years back, yet it contains some fresh content… No, it’s not about the Twilight Zone!

Drucker asks the same questions he did many years ago and this time we have some fresh answers by experts such as Jim Collins and Philip Kotler.

This is a really interesting idea for an author or publisher.

A bit like an interview book with a twist. Ask the experts how they would deal with certain business issues. Keep it simple, say, down to five questions. Record the answers and voila! A book. Even better, do it again with different experts next year…

In case you're wondering, the five most important questions you can ask about your organization are:

Drum roll please...

1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

This could easily be used to create a one-page business plan...