Top Business Leaders' Top Reads

Information is everywhere. With the abundance of how-to guides and business manuals available, US News & World Report asked 14 business leaders what top five books they would recommend for building a better business, investing, and living life well.

Recommended by 4 of the 14 business leaders, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Other Don't (Collins; 2001) by Jim Collins examines company data from more than 1400 firms and highlights 11 companies that have substantially improved their performance. Wired magazine's editor in chief, Chris Anderson, picked Fooled by Randomness (Random House; 2005) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as his top choice, citing Taleb’s argument that nothing can be predicted, including stock markets. Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (University of Chicago Press; 1999) by Robert Kuttner, chosen by Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, makes a case that market-based approaches made to other aspects of life, such as health care, hurt the economy.

Additional recommendations included Five Essentials for a Winning Life (Rodale Books; 2006) by Chris Carmichael, The Gospel of Wealth (Book Jungle; 2007) by Andrew Carnegie, The Only Investment Guide You Will Ever Need (Harvest Books; 2005) by Andrew Tobias, Diffusion of Innovations (Free Press; 2003) by Everett Rogers, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.