Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools

While there is certainly a lot of crap out there for business books, especially on sales/marketing and management, there are some core books that are must reads if you want to save 30 years of trial and error.

1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners) 2. Competitive Strategy 3. Discipline of Market Leaders 4. Good to Great 5. Built to Last

I disagree on "Good to Great" and "Built to Last". In hindsight, they're classic extrapolations of survivorship-bias in a specific era of business instead of durable business practices. It should be more accurately titled as "Built to Fail" considering how those profiled companies have faltered or floundered.

I highly recommend Buffett's letters to shareholders https://a.co/d/cc1ufM4 and Goldratt's "The Goal" https://a.co/d/iJjTf1y and Taleb's "Antifragile" https://a.co/d/4bjC74J . Aside from his mathematical treatment's of uncertainty (which are free), I wouldn't recommend any of Teleb's other books.

"Let My People Go Surfing" https://a.co/d/2hq7ngp doesn't work for all business, but I really found it personally inspirational.

If you like anti-fragile, I really recommend Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan. The Black Swan is a good example of a book with a good original idea that gets repeated so often its almost conventional wisdom, except that half the people saying it are misusing the term because they didn’t read the book.