Our weblog is an adjunct to our Imagenextcs residency sessions; these bi-annual residency sessions are designed to create dialogue among practitioners who are working on continuous improvement and new ideas for customer interface, interaction and delivery of goods and services. Our weblog is intended to broaden these conversations and solicit input from anyone developing ideas that are centered on how next generation customers and systems will look, feel and work.

Monday, December 8, 2008

10 Books that you should read...

I am often asked by my student’s at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business what I am reading, or better yet, what I think might be a good book for them to read so they may understand business better. I have been pondering this lately, as I believe it applies to clients and students alike. The exercise I have required of myself this past week is to consider, and then select what I believe to be the top ten books I would recommend to anyone in business, new or seasoned, and anyone in academia, student or faculty.

I also considered anyone who does not fall into these categories but may want to read some of the important works written, that I believe to provide insight and wisdom surrounding important aspects of business and leadership in the US.

The difficulty of course is taking everything that is out there, and everything that has influenced one’s career and orientation toward work, and then narrowing the list to only 10. This is a separate exercise in itself.

So, here they are:

  • The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith, 1776
  • The Gospel of Wealth – Andrew Carnegie, 1889
  • In Search of Excellence – Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., 1982
  • Out of the Crisis – Dr. W. Edwards Deming, 1982, 1986
  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey, 1989
  • Being Digital – Nicholas Negroponte, 1995
  • Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies – James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, 1994
  • Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t – James C. Collins, 2001
  • The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century - Thomas L. Friedman, 2005
  • Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, 2008

I would really like to hear your comments and thoughts and consider what you might place on a top ten business book list exercise.