My Top 10 Business Self-Help Books

I tried to rank them with most impactful (to me) at the top.

1. Peter Drucker – The Effective Executive. If there is any business book to read and improve how you deliver, this is it.

2. Dale Carnegie – How to win friends and influence people. It’s all obvious and intuitive and most of us don’t do it.

3. Brene Brown – Daring Greatly. It’s not only OK to be vulnerable, it is preferable.

4. Ryan Holiday – The Daily Stoic. I have been (badly) practicing stoicism for a few years now. This is a daily bite sized reminder for better living.

5. James Clear – Atomic Habits. Reading these books doesn’t help without implementation. Break bad habits and form good ones.

6. Steven Covey – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Complete, inclusive, and amazing structured, distillation of how to. 

7. Marcus Buckingham – First Break All the Rules. Data driven insight, structure, and guide to better team satisfaction. And foundation of the Employee Engagement Survey we use today.

8. Jim Collins – Good to Great. Data driven classic study on what makes some companies OK and what makes others outperform.

9. David Allen – Getting Things Done. Even if you don’t have the discipline to adopt all GTD, there are habits in here to increase performance.

10. Jocko Willink – Extreme Ownership. I like Jocko for his (gruff) musings on discipline and extreme ownership (you are responsible for not just those tasks which you directly control, but for all those that affect whether or not your mission is successful)