Posted by Tony DiCostanzo on Dec 03, 2014
Best Business Books of 2014
2014 may be coming to an end, but it’s not too late to read some of the year’s best business books! Highlighted below our my top 10 picks for business books published in 2014:
1. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter Charles Duhigg introduces the new science of habits, explaining why they exist and how they can be changed to improve our personal and professional lives. At its core, The Power of Habit argues that the key to achieving success in all areas of our lives lies in understanding how habits work.
2. Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
Simon Sinek studies the biology of successful teams to explain how great leaders create environments in which people naturally work together to do remarkable things. Drawing from a wide range of examples, from manufacturing and the military to the government and investment banking, his theory is proven over and over again. When it matters most, leaders who are willing to eat last are rewarded with deeply loyal colleagues who will unite to pursue a common vision and their organization’s interests.
3. Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less
Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao draw on inside accounts and case studies, as well as academic research from a variety of industries — including start-ups, airlines, pharmaceuticals, retail, high-tech, financial services, education, government, non-profits and healthcare — to identify the key challenges that every organization must confront. Scaling Up Excellence reveals the principles that help cascade excellence throughout an organization.
4. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century offers compelling insight into the modern business issues of inequality and the concentration of wealth. Through analyzing a collection of data from twenty countries over several centuries, Piketty uncovers key economic and social patterns that reorient our understanding of economic history and confront us with sobering lessons for today.
5. Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
The authors of the New York Times bestseller Freakonomics are back with Think Like a Freak. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner use their trademark blend of storytelling and unconventional analysis to offer readers a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems. Whether your interest lies in minor life hacks or major global reform, the book teaches you ways to retrain your brain by covering a variety of topics.
6. Invisibles: The Power of Anonymous Work in an Age of Relentless Self-Promotion
For most people, the better they perform the more attention they receive. Yet for many skilled professionals whose role is critical to their enterprise, it’s the opposite: the better they perform, the more unnoticed they become. Oftentimes, it’s only when something goes wrong that they are noticed at all. David Zweig takes a look into the lives and careers of “invisibles,” workers who become more anonymous when they perform well at their jobs, to prove that the rest of society has a lot to learn about satisfaction and achievement.
7. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data, and at the same time, we’re expected to make more decisions faster than ever before. Somehow, there are some people that become quite accomplished at managing information flow. Daniel J. Levitin uses the latest in brain science to show how these special people excel and demonstrates methods readers can use to regain mastery of organization of their homes, workplaces and time.
8. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
The great secret of our time is that there are still many uncharted frontiers to explore and brand new inventions to create. In Zero to One, Peter Thiel, a legendary entrepreneur and investor, and Blake Masters show how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Their book presents an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way to think about innovation.
9. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators tells the story of people who created the computer and the Internet. Beginning with the story of Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s, Isaacson recounts the tales of fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution. Destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution, The Innovators is an indispensable guide to how innovation actually happened.
10. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
In Hooked, Nir Eyal explains The Hook Model, the four-step process to create products that subtly encourage customer behavior. Based on years of consulting, research and experience, Eyal shows that these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing its users back again and again without depending on costly or aggressive advertising. Written for product managers, marketers, designers and startup founders, Hooked is the book Eyal wished had been available to him as a start-up founder: a how-to guide for building better products.
More titles that deserve an honorable mention:
- Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder by Jim Clifton and Sangeeta Bharadwaj Badal
- Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull
- This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
- The Gen Z Effect: The Six Forces Shaping the Future of Business by Tom Koulopoulos and Dan Keldsen
- How We Got to Now: Six Innovators That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
- How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
- Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin
- Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
- Economics: The User’s Guide by Ha-Joon Chang
- Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking by Christian Rudder