The Top 40 Essential Business Books to Read

40 OF THE BEST BUSINESS BOOKS TO READ

HBR Press publishes the best business books that set the agenda for organizations and leaders around the world. Here you will find some of our best selling titles that have strongly resonated with our readers. Each book will strengthen your management skills and help you get the results you need in business and beyond. A successful career starts here with these top selling books from HBR.

TIMELESS BEST SELLERS
NEW CLASSICS
PRACTICAL SKILLS
CEO AND EXECUTIVE VOICES
ESSENTIAL WISDOM FROM HBR

Select Category

TIMELESS BEST SELLERS

The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster

By Michael Watkins

In this updated and expanded version of the international bestseller The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins offers proven strategies for conquering the challenges of transitions--no matter where you are in your career. Whether you're starting a new job, being promoted from within, embarking on an overseas assignment, or being tapped as CEO, how you manage your transition will determine whether you succeed or fail. Use this book as your trusted guide.
Learn More
Leading Change

By John Kotter

Millions worldwide have read and embraced John Kotter's ideas on change management and leadership. Needed more today than at any time in the past, this immensely relevant book serves as both a visionary guide and a practical toolkit on how to approach the difficult yet crucial work of leading change in any type of organization.
Learn More
Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

By W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

In this perennial bestseller, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans"--untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.
Learn More
The Innovator’s Dilemma, with a New Foreword: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

By Clayton M. Christensen

In this classic bestseller--one of the most influential business books of all time--innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right yet still lose market leadership. Now with a foreword by Marc Benioff, the cofounder and CEO of Salesforce, Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation.
Learn More
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

By A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin

Playing to Win, a noted Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller. This is A.G. Lafley's guidebook. Shouldn't it be yours as well? It outlines the strategic approach Lafley, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, used to double P&G's sales, quadruple its profits, and increase its market value by more than $100 billion when Lafley was first CEO (he led the company from 2000 to 2009).
Learn More
Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean

By Karen Berman, Joe Knight, and John Case

Inc. magazine calls it one of "the best, clearest guides to the numbers" on the market. Readers agree, saying it's exactly "what I need to know" and calling it a "must-read" for decision makers without expertise in finance. Accessible, jargon-free, and filled with entertaining stories of real companies, Financial Intelligence gives nonfinancial managers the confidence to understand the nuance beyond the numbers--to help bring everyday work to a new level.
Learn More
The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

By Will Thorndike

It's time to redefine the CEO success story. Meet eight iconoclastic leaders who helmed firms where returns on average outperformed the S&P 500 by over 20 times. Drawing on extensive research, author Will Thorndike tells many of these leaders' stories for the first time--and extracts lessons for those of you hoping to lead your company to exceptional returns today.
Learn More
Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change

By Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky

It's exciting to think of leadership as all inspiration, decisive action, and rich rewards, but leading requires taking risks that can jeopardize your career. In this classic, renowned leadership experts Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky show how it's possible to make a difference in your organization without getting “taken out” or pushed aside. Through vivid stories from all walks of life, the authors present straightforward strategies for navigating the perilous straits of leadership.
Learn More
Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

By Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie Mckee

This is the book that established "emotional intelligence" in the business lexicon--and made it a necessary skill for leaders. Managers and professionals across the globe have embraced Primal Leadership, affirming the importance of emotionally intelligent leadership. The book and its ideas are now used routinely in universities, business and medical schools, professional training programs, and by a growing legion of professional coaches.
Learn More
Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

By Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs--along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations--combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward.
Learn More

NEW CLASSICS

Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World

By Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani

AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value. Authors Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have restricted business growth for hundreds of years.
Learn More
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems

By Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss

When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed--and that it keeps you from building a great company. Helping executives and entrepreneurs solve their toughest problems over the past decade, Frei and Morriss learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false.
Learn More
Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High

By David Noble and Carol Kauffman

The hardest part of leadership is mastering the inevitable high-risk, high-stakes challenges you will face. Whether you're making a split-second decision when your business is knocked sideways or you're finding the best strategy to navigate business-critical long-term circumstances, how can you be in peak form in those most crucial moments? Leadership coaching legends David Noble and Carol Kauffman show you how with their innovative new framework--MOVE--which equips you with the tactics you need to slow down high-stakes situations before they speed you up.
Learn More
Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

By Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb

Written by three eminent economists, Prediction Machines recasts the rise of AI as a drop in the cost of prediction and lifts the curtain on the AI-is-magic hype to show how different industries can benefit from it. The impact of AI will be profound, but as this book shows, the economic framework for understanding it is surprisingly simple.
Learn More
The Three Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation

By Vijay Govindarajan

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both, simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business--one that is still thriving--while dramatically reinventing it?
Learn More
Love and Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life

By Marcus Buckingham

In his new book, world-renowned researcher and New York Times bestselling author Marcus Buckingham helps us discover where we're at our best — both at work and in life. In understanding our unique strengths and loves, we can choose the right role on a team, mold our existing roles so it calls on our very best, and as leaders, make lasting change for our teams and organizations.
Learn More
The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed

By Linda K. Yates

Imagine if the multinational hotel groups had founded Airbnb, or the big auto companies had launched Uber and Tesla, or Blockbuster had created Netflix. In The Unicorn Within, Mach49 founder and CEO Linda Yates empowers large companies to beat startups at their own game--to build a pipeline and portfolio of new ventures to drive meaningful growth. How? With a teachable, repeatable, scalable method focused 100 percent on execution across the spectrum of venture creation from Ideate to Incubate, Accelerate, and Scale.
Learn More
The Founders Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth

By Chris Zook and James Allen

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? When Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external. Through rich analysis and inspiring examples, this book shows how any leader--not only a founder--can instill and leverage a founder's mentality throughout their organization and find lasting, profitable growth.
Learn More
The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results

By Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter

Based on extensive research, including assessments of more than 35,000 leaders and interviews with 250 C-level executives, The Mind of the Leaderconcludes that organizations and leaders aren't meeting employees' basic human needs of finding meaning, purpose, connection, and genuine happiness in their work. To solve the leadership crisis, organizations need to put people at the center of their strategy.
Learn More
The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying about What People Think of You

By Michael Gervais and Kevin Lake

High-performance psychologist Michael Gervais presents a groundbreaking guide for overcoming what may be the single greatest constrictor of human potential: our fear of people’s opinions (FOPO). FOPO shows up almost everywhere in our lives--and the consequences are great. When we let FOPO take control, we play it safe and small because we're afraid of what will happen on the other side of critique. In The First Rule of Mastery, Michael Gervais shows us that the key to leading a high-performance life is to redirect our attention from the world outside us to the world inside us.
Learn More

PRACTICAL SKILLS

How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart about the Numbers

By Mihir Desai

Through entertaining case studies, interactive exercises, full-color visuals, and a conversational style that belies the topic, Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai tackles a broad range of topics that will give you the knowledge and skills you need to finally understand how finance works.
Learn More
HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations

By Nancy Duarte

Terrified of speaking in front of a group? Or simply looking to polish your skills? No matter where you are on the spectrum, this guide, written by presentation expert Nancy Duarte, will give you the confidence and the tools you need to get the results you desire.
Learn More
Good Charts, Updated and Expanded: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations

By Scott Berinato

Making good charts is a must-have skill for managers today. But many think that data visualization is too difficult--a specialist skill that's either the province of data scientists and complex software packages or the domain of professional designers and their visual creativity. Not so. Anyone can learn to produce quality "dataviz" and, more broadly, clear and effective information design. Good Charts will show you how to do it.
Learn More
Harvard Business Review Manager's Handbook: The 17 Skills Leaders Need to Stand Out

By Nancy Duarte

The one primer you need to develop your managerial and leadership skills. Whether you're a new manager or looking to have more influence in your current management role, the challenges you face come in all shapes and sizes--a direct report's anxious questions, your boss's last-minute assignment of an important presentation, or a blank business case staring you in the face.
Learn More
HBR Guide to Better Business Writing

By Bryan Garner

When you are fumbling for words and pressed for time, you might be tempted to dismiss good business writing as a luxury. But it is a skill you must cultivate to succeed. The HBR Guide to Better Business Writing, by writing expert Bryan Garner, gives you the tools you need to express your ideas clearly and persuasively so clients, colleagues, stakeholders, and partners will get behind them.
Learn More
Getting Along: How to Deal with Anyone (Even Difficult People)

By Amy Gallo

Work relationships can be hard. The stress of dealing with difficult people dampens our creativity and productivity and can cause us to disengage. In Getting Along, workplace expert Amy Gallo identifies eight familiar types of difficult coworkers—the insecure boss, the passive-aggressive peer, the know-it-all, and others—and provides strategies for dealing constructively with each one.
Learn More
Dealing with Difficult People (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

At the heart of dealing with difficult people is handling their--and your own--emotions. How do you stay calm in a tough conversation? How do you know if you're difficult to work with? This book explains the research behind our emotional response to challenging colleagues and shows how to build the empathy and resilience to make those relationships more productive.
Learn More
Mindfulness (HBR Emotional Intelligence Series)

The benefits of mindfulness include better performance, heightened creativity, deeper self-awareness, and increased charisma--not to mention greater peace of mind. This book gives you practical steps for building a sense of presence into your daily work routine.
Learn More
The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right

By Gorick Ng

You've landed a job. Now what? No one tells you how to navigate your first day in a new role. No one tells you how to take ownership, manage expectations, or handle workplace politics. No one tells you how to get promoted. The answers to these professional unknowns lie in the unspoken rules--the certain ways of doing things that managers expect but don't explain and that top performers do but don't realize.
Learn More

CEO AND EXECUTIVE VOICES

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism

By Hubert Joly and Caroline Lambert

Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy and orchestrator of the retailer's spectacular turnaround, unveils his personal playbook for achieving extraordinary outcomes by putting people and purpose at the heart of business.
Learn More
Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World

By Ginni Rometty

Ginni Rometty led one of the world's most iconic companies, and in Good Power she recounts her groundbreaking path from a challenging childhood to becoming the CEO of IBM and one of the world's most influential business leaders. With candor and depth, Rometty shares milestones from her life and career while redefining power as a way to drive meaningful change in positive ways for ourselves, our organizations, and for the many, not just the few--a concept she calls "good power."
Learn More
Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take

By Paul Polman and Andrew Winston

In this seminal book, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman and sustainable business guru Andrew Winston argue that to thrive today and tomorrow, companies must become “net positive” — giving more to the world than they take. With bold vision and compelling stories, Net Positivesets out the principles and practices that will deliver the scale of change and transformation the world so desperately needs.
Learn More
Breaking Through: Communicating to Open Minds, Move Hearts, and Change the World

By Sally Susman

The ability to communicate to reach people and drive public conversation is a rock-hard competency. In this wise and inspiring book, Sally Susman, the renowned head of corporate affairs at global biopharmaceutical giant Pfizer, tells the fascinating story of how the company managed the massive communications challenge that came with Covid-19 and the race to produce an effective vaccine–and the principles that enabled her to break through, connect, and help move people forward.
Learn More
How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People

By David Novak

When you put learning at the center of everything you do, you grow your career, your leadership, your relationships, and your joy and fulfillment in life. But even for people who are naturally curious and interested in solving problems, being an effective learner who can turn their learning into action takes insight and practice. With infectious enthusiasm and optimism, David Novak shows you how to master active learning.
Learn More
Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations

By Ron Shaich

Ron Shaich, founder and former CEO of Panera Bread, shares the lessons he learned from a lifetime of asking what really matters and then making the transformations necessary to bring what really matters to life. He reveals what he learned about entrepreneurship, running large enterprises, business transformation, and life itself.
Learn More

ESSENTIAL WISDOM FROM HBR

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Mental Toughness

By Harvard Business Review

If you read nothing else on mental toughness, read these ten articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you build your emotional strength and resilience--and to achieve high performance.
Learn More
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself

By Harvard Business Review

The path to your own professional success starts with a critical look in the mirror. What you see there--your greatest strengths and deepest values--are the foundations you must build on. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on managing yourself and selected the most important ones to help you stay engaged and productive throughout your working life.
Learn More
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence

By Harvard Business Review

In his defining work on emotional intelligence, bestselling author Daniel Goleman found that it is twice as important as other competencies in determining outstanding leadership. If you read nothing else on emotional intelligence, read these 10 articles by experts in the field.
Learn More
HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership

By Harvard Business Review

How can you transform yourself from a good manager into an extraordinary leader? We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles on leadership and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance.
Learn More
HBR at 100: The Most Influential and Innovative Articles from Harvard Business Review's First Century

By Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review is the foremost destination for smart management thinking. Now, at its 100th anniversary, this commemorative volume brings together the most influential ideas since its inception. With an introduction written by editor in chief Adi Ignatius, HBR at 100 features business publishing's most influential voices on essential topics.
Learn More

HBR-EXCLUSIVE TOOLKITS CAN HELP YOU PUT THE IDEAS FROM THESE BESTSELLING BOOKS INTO PRACTICE.

Playing to Win Strategy Toolkit

Strategy work can be a frustrating, stressful process that doesn't always lead to actionable results. This time it CAN be different. The Playing to Win Strategy Toolkit delivers an industry-proven strategy framework with step-by-step support to develop and implement successful strategy at any organization.
Learn More
Real-Time Leadership: The Playbook

As a leader, you will inevitably face high-risk, high-stakes challenges that require you to respond in real time--to master the moment, generate response options, and quickly evaluate those options before acting. Real-Time Leadership: The Playbook is an interactive resource that offers a series of exercises and reflection questions to help you put the principles of real-time leadership into practice.
Learn More
The Three-Box Solution Strategy Toolkit Set

Help your organization innovate and execute. The Three-Box Solution Strategy Toolkit Set leads you step by step through a powerful process to generate breakthrough innovations and bring them to life.
Learn More

Discover more books in the HBR Store

Shop

Copyright Permissions

Order for your team and save!