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Best Business Books 2013

Our annual review of the year’s best business books.

(originally published by Booz & Company)

Welcome to the 13th annual edition of strategy+business’s best business books. Every year we strive to assemble a reading list that will not only engross and entertain you, but also provide concepts, tools, and insights that can help you lead your company to a better future.

This year’s best business books section includes seven essays by expert guides. Walter Kiechel III, former Fortune managing editor, reviews books on strategy that reflect two realities: Competitive advantage is transient, and continuous innovation is an imperative. David Hurst, s+b contributing editor, selects books that tell company stories, each a chronicle of failure, but not always recovery. John Jullens, a Booz & Company partner working in China, presents books that explore the three waves of global competitors that are emerging from developing economies. Howard Rheingold, who’s been surfing the leading edge of digitization since the early 1980s, picks out books that examine three emerging digital phenomena—big data, socialstructing, and spreadable media. Catharine Taylor, a journalist who has been covering the sea change in marketing in the past decade, offers a set of books that eschew the hoopla of social media and instant ads for the essence of marketing: the customer experience. Sally Helgesen, an author and leadership consultant, takes on self-help books for managers. And James O’Toole, a senior fellow in business ethics at the University of Santa Clara’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, finds leadership lessons in the biographies and memoirs of auto industry executives who made the Motor City roll.

Good reading!

Contents:

s+b’s Top Shelf

Strategy
Rebuilding the Temple Mount
by Walter Kiechel

Company Stories
Lessons in Failure
by David K. Hurst

Globalization
Here Come the New Competitors
by John Jullens

Digitization
Three Harbingers of Change
by Howard Rheingold

Marketing
Is Your Brand Experienced?
by Catharine P. Taylor

Managerial Self-Help
Influence, Inquiry, Action
by Sally Helgesen

Leadership
Running the Detroit Three
by James O’Toole

Reprint No. 00223  

 

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