Howdy folks!
Want an easy Christmas gift for the business nerd in your life? I’ve got you covered. Because today it’s…
- 10 books that teach you how the world works
(Plus handy Amazon links, so Santa Girdley earns a few cents in affiliate fees!)
Most business books these days are 90% filler. They should have been a pamphlet. It’s usually better to just find a podcast where the author’s a guest.
But there are exceptions. Here are 10 of them, and each one shaped who I am today.
They’re not super tactical how-to books. (If you want tactics, check out my post on the 9 systems every small business needs.)
They’re about how the world works.
Got a business-minded reader in your life? I just did your Christmas shopping.
Book #1: My Years With General Motors, by Alfred P Sloan.
Alfred P Sloan was the executive who basically built General Motors into the juggernaut car manufacturer it was in its heyday.
And he basically created the idea of corporations and departments.
At the time, people didn’t really know how corporations and stuff were supposed to work. They were basically improvising the whole thing. So it took guys like Sloan to go through and figure it out.
He was the first guy answering questions like: What does a general manager do? What does a CEO do? What does a president do?
With the book, you can follow along with his thinking. So when someone today says, “Yeah, every company needs a CEO,” you actually understand why.
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Book #2: High Output Management, by Andy Grove.
Andy Grove came to America as an immigrant and went on to found Intel.
His philosophy is that businesses act as machines with a job to be done. The people, the systems, the resources — everything that ties into the business helps that machine.
It’s your goal as a manager to put each component together and run it like a factory - whose job is to take care of your customers.
Andy’s thinking ties into many of my beliefs today.
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Book #3: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
A lot of people say this one’s outdated, but they’re totally wrong. It was written in 1936 but it resonates to this day.
It covers stuff like how to speak effectively, how to win people over, and even how to change peoples’ minds. These are all crucial in becoming somebody that people want to work and spend time with.
Think of people like Charles Koch and great leaders like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or in the modern day Jeff Bezos. They may be polarized in the media, but people still love them.
And the fundamental principles of why they’re loved were put together in this book.
There's so many techniques here that are important. And from a practical / life skills standpoint, just an amazing book.
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Book #4 The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder
There are a million books written on Warren Buffett. So here are the two takeaways that make this one in particular a great book.
The first is this: how to play a single game for a very long time.
Most people struggle to play any game for over a decade. But with a maniacal focus and a patience to push forwards, oftentimes, things fall into place. This has worked for me personally — my life turned around when I started planning a decade at a time.
The second thing that makes this book great: it’s a good warning of what can go wrong when you’re too extreme in any particular area.
Buffett, when you read into this, was actually a crappy husband and a really crappy father. And that's the cost to be an extreme 0.01% performer. But in the end, he made that choice.
Now, this also leads me to where I am today, where I want to live a life of harmony between all the things I do. I don't want to go extreme in any single area. And reading about somebody like Warren who chooses to be extreme is actually a lesson in the negative for me.
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Book #5: Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill
This book is all about the power of what positive thinking can do for you. And if you know me, you’d know I’m a huge optimist in life.
It was written in 1937 during the great depression. People were literally dying and the world was in chaos. So this guy really had to practice what he preached. And all of that left me realizing what a difference the right mindset could make.
On another note — this book changed my thinking about “masterminds”, which I think is a totally misused concept. It points out how important it is to find like-minded people on your journey of growth.
Because in a group, you can learn with the power of 10 people instead of just 1. (This was so huge for me I started Scalepath to help other small business leaders find community like I had.)
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Book #6: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryū Suzuki
A lot of my philosophy is very Zen and Zen Buddhist type stuff. I wouldn't say I follow the doctrine or anything like that, but a bunch of the fundamental principles of Zen and Buddhism are super important to me.
Stuff like always keeping a beginner’s mind. Instead of being a person who closes their mind off to feedback and new things, you always try to have a beginner's mind and always grow.
There are a bunch of other things in here about posture, breathing, perception and non-duality — you know, deep stuff! — all topics that are very interesting, but there’s another concept that strikes me.
It’s the fact that people want to see things as black and white, when the truth is that the world is much more gray.
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Book #7: The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done
We’ve talked about Alfred Sloan and how to think about corporations. We talked about Andy Grove and that’s taught me how to think about what the job of a business is.
Next we have Drucker who is the OG guy who went and studied how to run a business really well. The way we think about managing, leading, and getting things done these days, it all comes from him.
The problem: Drucker’s original writing is incredibly difficult to read. So this person broke it up into 366 manageable lessons.
It’s basically the TLDR of all of his ideas.
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Book #8: HMS Surprise, by Patrick O’Brian
Yep, this is the Master & Commander guy!
This is one of a series of buddy novels called the Aubrey Maturin series, about a guy named Jack Aubrey and his surgeon Stephen Maturin. It’s set in the Napoleonic wars and they’re part of the English Navy.
Initially, you think the book is going to just be adventure, but the book goes much deeper. What you actually see is two guys who are very different from each other living a lifetime of friendship.
To me, the whole thing is a treatise on how to be a great friend. It's about giving, and enabling the other person to be their best selves. And when this is done by two people, you can easily become lifelong friends.
Looking back, it was when I read these books that my real life relationships blossomed into lifelong friendships. So that was emotional!
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Book #9: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
They make you read this in eighth grade. Also, I have no idea why Goodreads rates this at 3.61.
There is no book that I think better takes the emotion of people who just go - and just have a motor that can't be stopped.
It’s how I feel on the inside. I work hard and I get stuff done. You can see this with other professionals who go all-in with what they’re doing.
Reading this book made me realize, oh, I'm not the only one who wants to have this level of motor and high productivity.
But seriously, I have no idea why it's 3.61. Literally, it's one of the greatest books of all time.
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Book #10: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan
This is only one on the list I’ve read in the past five years.
It’s a memoir of a guy obsessed with surfing. Growing up he was this journeyman going out to chase days of adventure, doing all this crazy stuff around surfing and living a life above and beyond.
And to me, there's two takeaways.
Number one is life is what you make it. I truly think you have an opportunity to go create the life you want. I live that every day. Trying to shape the world rather than letting life come to me.
The second thing is: Finnegan wrote this book in his sixties. And to me, the emotional connection of hearing somebody share their life in that last quarter was a big realization.
I’m turning 50 in January, and someday this is all gonna end. So it's my job to make the most of every minute going forward.
And no book has done that for me like this one has.
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And there you have it, 10 books that changed how I see the world and business. Go check ‘em out! Or don’t!
Have a great week!
Michael
