Best Selling Business Books 2016

We picked the books for best selling business books 2016 from a number of on and offline sources. These books can help you understand what is going on in our economy, why some businesses succeed and others fail and how to be more successful in your business endeavors.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers: The Story of Success to show how circumstances help shape successful people. While it admits that intelligence and hard work are absolutely necessary for success, this book also shows that other factors – factors not under one’s personal control – may boost or limit a person’s ultimate achievements.

What is an “outlier”? A data point that lies outside the average set of points. Gladwell explains that the success of some of the human outliers, the truly high achievers, can only be explained by looking beyond their own personal abilities.

Here’s a teaser: Why do most of the NHL’s Canadian players celebrate their birthdays from January through March?

Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine tells how the world’s economy sputtered on a “credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime collateral loan” – but tells it very, very well.

The greed inherent in modern finance is balanced by the folly of following the herd.  Lewis interviewed the people who took a position opposite to the prevailing wisdom: that the red-hot housing market would survive despite sub-prime mortgage loans.

The Big Short lets you decide – or at least ponder – whether the institutions were blind to the dangers or knowingly foisted toxins on unsuspecting investors.  Whatever your judgment, you will find this book a terrific read.

Jerry Weintraub (with Rich Cohen) tells his own story in When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead.

In the book’s subtitle, he calls himself a “persuasive man” – and so he is.

Weintraub was a music manager for Elvis and Sinatra; a Broadway producer; a movie producer…To read his version, there was nothing at which he did not succeed.

Some readers may find Weintraub overbearing, but the rest of us will be entertained and take some notes to see if we too might be nearly as successful.

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, by Peter and Andrew Schiff, is a compelling fictional story.  It starts with castaways who borrow fish…and explains global economics and government incentives.

Plus, it has humor.

Tom Rath is the author of Gallup’s update of its 2001 book, Discover Your Strengths, is StrengthsFinder 2.0.

The plan is simple: determine what your strengths are; focus on them; succeed.

The book – and the online test – present thirty-four “themes” of strengths.  The test determines which five themes form your strong suit.

Note that the book contains a one-use registration code for the online test, and is required if you want to receive the feedback from the test.

Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath, follows their book Made to Stick.

Switch continues dealing with motivational psychology…but perhaps this review should follow Switch’s advice...

The boss of a company in India hires a rider – a mahout – and his elephant to carry logs.  The boss wants him to use a different path.  But the current path is easy to follow.

So the boss explains to the mahout: “See, by taking your current route you are interfering with my other workers. They have to get out of the way of your elephant.  It costs me too much in lost time”.

“But I am paid by the log. I would lose money by taking the longer, more hilly, and more rocky route” replied the mahout.

The boss agrees to maintain the mahout’s daily pay, at least until they determine how many logs will be carried.

…They still have to convince the elephant to climb hills…and perhaps the new route should be improved so it is easier for the elephant…

Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People returned to the notion that personal habits form the strategic basis for success.  It is a welcome change from the tactical approach of “how to succeed in this one task” or
“in this one dimension”.

Some may parallels between Covey’s final habit, of continuous self-renewal and improvement, and the business and manufacturing principles of continuous quality improvement.

The 7 Habits is required reading in a number of successful businesses.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen, presents a systematic approach to reducing clutter in one’s mind in order to achieve higher productivity in life.

Allen, an executive coach and management consultant, has distilled principles of work-flow management that can help anyone achieve more in less time.

I hope you found best selling business books 2016 to be useful. You should also check out best mystery books for kids and best books for 12 year old girls.