BusinessWeek magazine ranks the 15 best selling hardcover and paperback business books for June 2009 and gives a short summary.
1. Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell. As you’d expect with Gladwell, there are lots of surprises in his explanation of why some people succeed fantastically. Pluck and smarts get less play here than such matters as one’s birth month and access to the right resources at just the right time. There are many points worth pondering in this enjoyable volume.
2.House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street
by William D. Cohan. Cohan’s hot-selling behind-the-scenes account of the financial recklessness at the heart of investment bank Bear Stearns’ collapse is a vividly told page-turner. It’s the definitive work, to date, on the events that signaled, and help set off, the financial crisis.
3. The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times
by Martin D. Weiss. Investor advocate Weiss has produced a guide to the safe havens for money available right now and, he claims, ways to turn the financial crisis into a wealth-building opportunity.
4. Bank on Yourself: The Life-Changing Secret to Growing and Protecting Your Financial Future
by Pamela Yellen. Yellen’s secret revolves around using a specific type of whole life insurance as a substitute for traditional banking. And she claims that it offers the reader a bullet-proof financial plan with predictable retirement income.
5. Peaks and Valleys: Making Good And Bad Times Work For You–At Work And In Life
by Spencer Johnson. The author of the hypersuccessful Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
has delivered a quick and easy read in the form of a parable about a young man who lives in a valley learning wisdom from an old man dwelling on a nearby peak. The basic lesson: better decisions boost your odds of winding up on higher ground.
6. The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance [Updated & Revised]
by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton. The authors, long devoted to the dissemination of “carrot culture,” are back, listing techniques for recognizing and praising the performers in an organization, the thing so many managers are afraid to do.
7. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
by Timothy Ferriss. Ferriss isn’t shy about tooting his own horn: He says he “speaks six languages, runs a multinational firm from wireless locations worldwide, and has been a world-record holder in tango, a national champion in kickboxing, and an actor in a hit television series in Hong Kong.” Is this the sort of person you really want to be taking advice from? Anyway, Ferris offers recommendations and resources for everything from eliminating wasted time to oursourcing your job and getting cheap airfare. Discover your dreams and live them!
8.Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life
by Donald J. Trump with Meredith McIver. Built from essays with titles such as “The More You Learn, The More You Realize What You Don’t Know”, and “There Are Times When You Should Move On”, this latest book from Trump is, well, pure Trump. It’s corny, boastful, and relentlessly optimistic. Prepare to be educated.
9. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller. Written by two of the top economists in the world, Animal Spirits is a bold and innovative work that tries to demonstrate how psychological factors led to the current mess. They started writing it together five years ago, which at times leads to it feeling like not all the parts fit together, but the main thesis is a vital one: People and businesses, long thought to act rationally, can wind up being anything but in times of boom or bust. And the ramifications can be sweeping.
10. Strengths-Based Leadership
by Tom Rath. This is the latest of the “strengths movement” titles, all of which aim at helping readers recognize and polish their true talents. Here, the authors say they identify keys to leadership and help executives build effective teams.
11. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
by Thomas E. Woods Jr. If you think that the current financial woes are due more to the Federal Reserve’s actions than to Wall Street finagling, then Woods’ book is for you. The author also joins the list of conservatives who are now piling on the New Deal, saying it worsened rather than ameliorated the Great Depression.
12. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America
by Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times columnist Friedman offers an urgent plea to unleash U.S. creativity—and capitalism—on the challenges of energy, climate change, and world population growth. “I am convinced that the public is ready,” he writes—“they’re ahead of the politicians.”
13. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
by Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter. Management guru and executive coach Goldsmith outlines 20 common habits (often unconscious, often annoying) of successful people that are holding them back from reaching the next level of attainment.
14. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
by Paul Krugman. This book was originally published in May of 1999, when the word “depression” was used primarily by historians. Suddenly, the book seems hugely more interesting, and Nobel Prize winner Krugman has also added new material and freshened up his older chapters. The result is a highly readable and provocative take on how we should respond to the current mess.
15. The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History
by Harry S. Dent, Jr. Dent’s thing is demographics, and his previous books have aimed at revealing how changes in the U.S. population made a “great boom” inevitable. But those days are gone, he now says: Suddenly, the optimist is a doomsayer. The Roaring 2000s, as he titled a 1998 book, are at an end: Wow, that was a short millennium!
