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ChangeThis has been invit­ing peo­ple to nom­i­nate their top busi­ness books, (the ones that actu­ally made a dif­fer­ence rather than the ones you picked up in an air­port and didn’t get past chap­ter four). Now, in a delight­fully post-modern twist, there’s going to be a book about the books – The 100 Best Busi­ness Books of All Time. You can see the list of those that made it here.

Are these the best busi­ness books of all time?

All the usual sus­pects are there Good to Great, In Search of Excel­lence, Tip­ping Point, Get­ting Things Done (which I own and have never fin­ished to my wife’s con­stant amuse­ment). It’s a good list.

The ones that I would have nom­i­nated that are already in include: Flow by the fan­tas­ti­cally named Mihaly Csikzent­mi­ha­lyi, A New Brand World by Scott Bed­bury, the bril­liant Orbit­ing the Giant Hair­ball by Gor­don MacKen­zie and The Art of Inno­va­tion by Tom Kelley.

Ones I would add:

• The Art of Pos­si­bil­ity by Ben­jamin and Ros Zan­der – my all time favourite and one of the few I return to again and again. Par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant just now it gives an uplift­ing view of liv­ing, work­ing and man­ag­ing today.
• Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath – the best sto­ry­telling book I’ve come across with some real prac­ti­cal insights that I use time and again.
• Unstuck by Keith Yamashita and San­dra Spataro – great, quick fire ways of think­ing your­self out of problems.
• Slide­ol­ogy by Nancy Duarte – the best book on pre­sen­ta­tion design ever by a long, long way.
• How Cus­tomers Think by Ger­ald Zalt­man – a com­plete eye-opener that clearly demon­strates that there is no such thing as a ratio­nal decision.
• We, Me, Them and It by John Sim­mons – the best book on writ­ing for busi­ness (all his other books are pretty damn good too).

Hav­ing said this, one thing about the 100 best list and the books on it – there is a dan­ger with adopt­ing such a canon of work that we fall into a sort of busi­ness and mar­ket­ing ortho­doxy. So, if I want per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing, I read Seth Godin. Pre­sen­ta­tions it’s Garr Reynolds. Viral it’s Mal­colm Glad­well. While I love all these books, it’s really impor­tant that we reg­u­larly step out­side the accepted canon (in fact out­side busi­ness alto­gether) to find truly fresh, orig­i­nal thinking.

Too many the­o­ries (par­tic­u­larly in mar­ket­ing) become estab­lished largely down to a catchy title and an engag­ing writ­ing style with­out the evi­dence to back them up. As inter­est­ing and fun as this can be, it can also cost a whole heap of money for very lit­tle return.

Now, time to get back to our new Twitter-based campaign…

(Image by But­ter­fly­sha on Flickr)

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