I’ve read a lot of business books in my life. Some profoundly shaped how I think; others were a waste of time. I share all my book reviews on my blog, but as I’ve reviewed over 1,000 books now, I’ve had a number of people ask me for advice on where to get started. To answer this question, in this blog post, I’ve put together a tier list for business books.
This tier list arranges the business books I’ve read from most useful (S tier, A tier) to least useful (C tier, D tier), as I navigated the challenges of building my own business. Nearly 10 years ago, I co-founded Gruntwork, so this tier list shows which books had the most impact on how I built that company.
Note that what is or isn’t a “business book” is not very well-defined. I’ve tried to keep this tier list to books that cover topics generally applicable to most modern businesses: e.g., strategy, management, marketing, design, communication, culture, and so on. Also, my apologies for a little bit of self-promotion, but I wrote a business book myself called Hello, Startup, and I included it in the tier list.
Without further ado, here is my Business Book Tier List (click on any book cover for my review and notes):
S
The most useful business books I've read
A
Highly useful for me
B
Reasonably useful for me
C
Somewhat useful for me
D
Not useful for me
As a small business owner, these are the books that shaped how I think and work—especially those in the S and A tiers. If you read any business books that profoundly affected how you worked, but they aren’t in my list, or perhaps they are in the list, but you’d rank them differently, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
