A Brief Guide to Business Classics

From The Art of War to The Wisdom of Failure

By: James M. Russell

Narrated by: Christopher Ragland

Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

The world of business books is a curious place where one can find everyone from great businesspeople like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk to the most spectacular business failures such as Enron and the subprime business market. There are geniuses, hard workers, academics and entrepreneurs as well a few charlatans and hucksters. There's even room for Donald Trump.

The 70 titles covered were chosen with various parameters in mind: to cover a range of areas of business, from sales and marketing to negotiation, entrepreneurship to investing, leadership to innovation, and from traditional and corporate models of business to start-up manuals and alternative angles on the subject.

Obvious best-selling titles such as How to Make Friends and Influence People or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have been included, but there are also those books of more questionable value often included on recommended lists of business classics, included here by way of warning.

The chosen books also cover a wide span of time and acknowledge that some of the most powerful or entertaining insights into business can be found in texts that aren't perceived as being 'business books', for instance The Art of War, Microserfs, Thinking Fast and Slow and The Wealth of Nations.

The selection includes a good range of the most recent successes in business publishing with which listeners may be less familiar. The titles are arranged chronologically, allowing the listener to dip in but also casting an intriguing light on how trends in business titles have changed over the years.

Among these titles you will find expert advice based on solid research (for instance The Effective Executive or Getting to Yes) and inspirational guides to setting up businesses and running them on sound foundations (such as True North, Crucial Conversations or We) alongside dubious management manuals that take a single flawed idea and stretch it out to the point of absurdity. The hope is that the listener will be inspired to seek out the best of these titles and ignore the worst of them and will come away with at least a basic idea of what each has to teach us about business.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2017 James M. Russell (P)2017 Little, Brown Book Group