Many of the world’s richest business people rave about reading business books. And rightly so – they certainly have a lot to offer…
There’s a lot to be gained from the content of the best business books, from understanding what best motivates people, to negotiation tactics, leadership techniques, and more.
But while some people do manage to find the time to read whole business books on the topic, few of us actually have the luxury of time to do so.
But equally, you do not necessarily need to read a book from cover to cover in order to understand its principles.
And the main takeaway from these free business book summaries is that they can easily be summarized in just a few sentences, and occasionally just one.
And to that end, this article is going to summarize several important business books in just one short paragraph each.
And without further ado, let’s get straight into it and know the best business book summaries!
(These book summaries aren’t listed in any particular order.)
1. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses By Eric Ries
A lack of resources to build a startup isn’t always a bad thing.
You can experiment, try different strategies, reflect and analyze, and replace grand strategies and capital before it gets costly.
2. 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
If you no longer want to be a corporate lifer doing 9 to 5 every weekday, you can escape it by focusing on making income in such a way that you only need to be productive for a few hours and receiving almost entirely passive income.
3. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us By Daniel H. Pink
Contrary to previous commonly held beliefs, the “carrot and/or stick” approach of external rewards and punishments is not the most effective way to motivate your workforce.
And in fact, the greatest motivation comes through intrinsic rewards, enjoying the task at hand.
4. The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future By Chris Guillebeau
You can start a micro business with just $100, and sometimes less. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.
5. The Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days By Chris Guillebeau
You can launch a side hustle and generate short-term income, all through using resources you already have, without the risk of losing your day job.
You don’t need an MBA, entrepreneurial experience, employees or investors. Moreover, a side hustle is the new job security.
6. The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People By Stephen R. Covey
In order to succeed, you must cultivate habits aligned with good principles. Be proactive, set goals, prioritize the right things, foster the open exchange of key ideas, and take care of yourself.
7. Influence Is Your Superpower By Zoe Chance
To influence what people think, learn how they think, and proceed in accordance with it.
8. How To Win Friends And Influence People By Dale Carnegie
Praise is more effective than criticism. Listen carefully to others. If you disagree with someone, do so as gently as possible. Make everyone feel interesting and important.
9. The Industries Of The Future by Alex Ross
According to the author, in the future, genetic code will become more important than computer code, since it is human material that is the “oil” of the information age.
10. The Wisdom Of Crowds By James Surowiecki
What crowd based online platforms such as Kickstarter and Wikipedia clearly demonstrate is that the wisdom of multiple individual perspectives can lead to substantially better outcomes.
This greatly supports concepts such as bottom-up decision-making and knowledge sharing.
11. Who Moved My Cheese? By Dr Spencer Johnson
Good situations never last forever, so be prepared for change. Dare to move in a new direction and things will get better.
12. Think And Grow Rich By Napoleon Hill
Goal setting and detailed planning are the basis of every achievement. Successful people believe in themselves. Knowledge is power. Utilize your subconscious mind.
Only the persistent will succeed. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses increases your chances of success.
13. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More By Chris Anderson
In this book, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur explains how the internet has changed consumer spending habits and in doing so, changed forever not just the way we shop but also the economy as a whole.
14. Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It By Christopher Voss
There’s more to negotiation than rationality and intellect. Successful negotiation is about building trust and gaining information. Never compromise and never rush negotiations.
15. Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers By Tim Ferriss
Success comes from working with long-term systems, rather than short-term goals. Ignoring peer pressure and taking big risks are both key to success.
16. How Google Works By Eric Schmidt And jonathan Rosenberg
The best way to attract the right people to your enterprise is to create a culture of learning and innovation.
17. Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action By Simon Sinek
Focusing on what a company can produce will ensure it remains only average. If instead you want to be great, you should inspire people to take action by galvanizing them with a compelling reason “why”.
18. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon By Brad Stone
With a relentless dedication and innovation for pleasing the consumer, and a really long term view, as per online retail giant Amazon, you can potentially dominate the retail market.
19. The Art Of The Deal By Donald Trump
Donald Trump, whatever you may think of him, certainly knows how to persuade and make a deal.
In this book, he asserts that to succeed in business, you need to balance boldness with the likes of patience, flexibility, and caution.
20. Black Box Thinking: : Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes – But Some Do By Matthew Syed
Positive thinking has its downside.
If, instead, you were focused on fault and failure, you are better able to learn from the mistakes the business is making, and consequently learn from them to improve on every aspect of the product and/or service as well as the business as a whole.
21. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail By Clayton Christensen
If businesses are to not only survive but thrive, they must purposefully engage in “disruptive innovation”.
This means that businesses should create new products, or services, that perform better than what’s already on the market, and at a lower cost to the consumer.
22. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers By Ben Horowitz
The hard thing about hard things, writes Horowitz, is that there is no ready-made formula for dealing with them.
23. Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! By Robert Kiyosaki
Educate yourself about finances, identify the valuable asset, and invest in it. Make money for yourself, not your employer.
24. Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t By Jim Collins
The right people in the right place are the foundation of greatness. Success requires confronting the nasty facts, while never losing faith in your vision.
25. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
Usually, an entrepreneur’s business won’t survive past adolescence. To get beyond this stage, you have to plan ahead from the start. What’s more, the process of planning and implementing never stops.
26. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead By Sheryl Sandberg
Women are still conspicuously absent from leadership positions, partially due to the leadership ambition gap. Women must carefully navigate the razor’s edge of ambition and likability.
27. The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business By Josh Kaufman
You don’t need business school. The perfect business big ideas balance money and passion. A product or service that satisfies a need will sell.
28. First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently By Marcus Buckingham
Great managers aren’t afraid to be unconventional, so don’t be afraid to change things up a little. Employee satisfaction is key to business success.
29. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance By Angela Duckworth
Persistence and effort are key to success. You can cultivate this grit in both yourself and your workforce.
30. Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine By Mike Michalowicz
The traditional approach to profit rarely works because it goes against our natural instincts. Learning how to do more with less will give your profits a boost.
31. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing By Al Ries And Jack Trout
Marketing is a battle of perceptions rather than of products. With today’s level of competition, a “me-too” copycat product has little chance of making it to the prospect’s mind.
Instead, you should create a new category of product or service that you can be first to the market with.
32. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike By Phil Knight
Rather than telling your workforce how to carry out tasks or projects, instead tell them what results you want to see and let them surprise you with their results.
33. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done By Peter F. Drucker
Effective executives lead by example. You have to make decisions and stand by them, even in the face of criticism. Listen to alternative viewpoints and learn from past outcomes. Eliminate useless activities.
34. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity By David Allen
Your brain is terrible at remembering things. Capture all your tasks, fresh ideas, reminders and more in trusted external collection tools. Always have clear next tasks for every project.
Constantly review your operations’ system. Understand your own priorities through a bottom-up examination.
35. Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins And Morten T. Hansen
Success comes from a combination of discipline, evidence-based innovation and a fear of failure. It is this recipe rather than luck or boldness that enables business to grow from good to great.
36. The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling
The first discipline of execution is to focus on specific, wildly important goals. The second is to meet your goals by choosing measures that reflect current behavior.
More than one third is to core workforce performance to motivate them. And the fourth is to establish a culture of accountability.
37. 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them And People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell
The biggest factor in business success is quality leadership. Great leaders are influential, intuitive, trustworthy, strong, courageous, loyal, and hungry for success.
They create winning teams with diverse talents and a shared vision, and they make the right decisions at the right times.
38. Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle
Cultivating a sense of belonging is the foundation of a strong group culture. Let people know that you’re listening to them. Share your vulnerabilities. Communicate your expectations and establish a common sense of purpose to unlock great group performance.
39. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
There are 6 major principles of influence: reciprocity, consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. People feel obligated to return favors, people like to be seen as consistent in their beliefs and actions.
We rely on others to determine what we should do. People rely on the opinions of experts. People we like are more persuasive to us. Items in short supply are more desirable.
40. Zero To One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Real innovation isn’t going from one to many, rather, it’s going from zero to one, or from nothing to something. Startups must go against conventional wisdom to bring real innovation to society.
Monopoly can be useful for innovation.
41. Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From The World Of Wall Street by John Brooks
The stock market is unpredictable. The story of Xerox demonstrates how quickly achieved success can vanish just as quickly. Business savvy and a clean conscience can co-exist. Stockholders rarely wield the power they have.
42. Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras
Visionary companies are driven more by a core ideology than profits, but they still prosper. And they preserve these ideologies while relentlessly stimulating progress and improvement. Visionary companies are almost cult-like – new recruits either thrive or leave.
43. Deep Work: Rules For Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
Deep work, or the kind of value-creating activity that requires maximum cognitive ability, can be very tough to do in the age of distractions. However, this type of deep work is vital to business world success.
44. Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Break Bad Habits and Build Good Ones by James Clear
By creating an environment for success, you don’t have to rely on mustering motivation every day.
Bad habits repeat themselves because you have the wrong system for change, but tiny changes in behavior can result in the formation of new habits and self-help you achieve big things.
45. Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet
We all have the power to be leaders. A leader-leader approach, where everyone pitches in, is the key to organizational success. Giving employees more responsibility makes them more productive.
46. Competition Demystified: A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy by Bruce C. Greenwald and Judd Kahn
There are but a few fundamental sources of competitive advantage. Most companies can tap these sources at a local level (not a national or international level)
47. Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin
Successful marketing requires creating things that other people find worth pointing out.
48. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
A business model starts with your customer groups, value propositions and market channels. Empathize with your customers to discover what they really need.
49. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Jobs was a controlling, temperamental boss driven by an uncompromising passion for perfection. Wanting to control the entire digital experience, Jobs created the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
50. Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier
Over planning can be harmful. What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. No excuses.
Wrap Up
I sincerely hope that this article has been helpful to you.
And if one or two of the great books discussed has sparked an interest for you, why not consider getting it, or even making the takeaways something that propels you and your business forward.
