Management Books Everyone Should Read
If you are looking for 10 management books you must read look no further. Here’s our recommendations of these great stories.
- First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently – Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
- The Essential Drucker – Peter Drucker
- The One Minute Manager – Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
- Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman
- Six Thinking Hats – Edward de Bono
- The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization – Peter Senge
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement – Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
- The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail – Clayton M. Christensen
- The Rules of Management: A Definitive Code for Managerial Success – Richard Templar
- What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business – Joan Magretta and Nan Stone
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First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
- Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its revolutionary study of more than 80,000 managers in First, Break All the Rules, revealing what the world’s greatest managers do differently. With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level.
2
The Essential Drucker
- Peter Drucker
Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher, Peter F. Drucker analyzed economics and society for more than sixty years. Containing twenty-six core selections, The Essential Drucker covers the basic principles and concerns of management and its problems, challenges, and opportunities, giving managers, executives, and professionals the tools to perform the tasks that the economy and society of tomorrow will demand of them.
3
The One Minute Manager
- Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
With more than two million hardcover copies in print, The One Minute Manager ranks as one of the most successful management books ever published. Now, you can listen and learn the strategies of one-minute management to save time and increase your productivity whether it be in your business, your home or even managing your children.
You will learn to use three easy-to-master management techniques that have already changed the lives of millions:
- One Minute Goal Setting
- One Minute Praising
- One Minute Reprimands
Deceptively simple, and measurably effective, the secrets of one-minute management will help you boost profits, productivity and purpose immediately.
4
Emotional Intelligence
- Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman's brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our “two minds”—the rational and the emotional—and how they together shape our destiny.
Drawing on ground breaking brain and behavioral research, Goleman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors, which include self-awareness, self-discipline, and empathy, add up to a different way of being smart—and they aren’t fixed at birth. Although shaped by childhood experiences, emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened throughout our adulthood—with immediate benefits to our health, our relationships, and our work.
5
Six Thinking Hats
- Edward de Bono
Used successfully by thousands of business managers, educators, and government leaders around the world, Six Thinking Hats offers a practical and uniquely positive approach to making decisions and exploring new ideas.
Your success in business depends on how you think. De Bono unscrambles the thinking process with his “six thinking hats”:
- White Hat: neutral and objective, concerned with facts and figures
- Red Hat: the emotional view
- Black Hat: careful and cautious, the “devil's advocate” hat
- Yellow Hat: sunny and positive
- Green Hat: associated with fertile growth, creativity, and new ideas
- Blue Hat: cool, the color of the sky, above everything else-the organizing hat
Through case studies and real-life examples, Dr. de Bono reveals the often surprising ways in which deliberate role playing can make you a better thinker. His book is an instructive and inspiring text for anyone who makes decisions, in business or in life.
6
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
- Peter Senge
As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.
In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations—ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire.
Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will:
- Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them
- Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity
- Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets
- Teach you to see the forest and the trees
- End the struggle between work and personal time
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The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
- Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal is the gripping novel which is transforming management thinking throughout the Western world.
Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try and improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant—or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a colleague from student days—Jonah—to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done.
The story of Alex's fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC) developed by Eli Goldratt.
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The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
- 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. Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation.
No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices. Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator's Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
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The Rules of Management: A Definitive Code for Managerial Success
- Richard Templar
Templar covers everything from setting realistic targets to holding effective meetings; finding the right people to inspiring loyalty. Discover how to adapt your management style to each team member, create your own game plan for success, cope with stress, stay healthy, and take charge, as if you were born to manage!
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What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
- Joan Magretta and Nan Stone
What Management Is is both a beginner’s guide and a bible for one of the greatest social innovations of modern times: the discipline of management. Joan Magretta, a former top editor at the Harvard Business Review, distills the wisdom of a bewildering sea of books and articles into one simple, clear volume, explaining both the logic of successful organizations and how that logic is embodied in practice.
Magretta makes rich use of examples— contemporary and historical—to bring to life management’s High Concepts: value creation, business models, competitive strategy, and organizational design. Most management books preach a single formula or a single fad. This one roams knowledgeably over the best that has been thought and written with a practical eye for what matters in real organizations.
These are just a few of the most popular and highly recommended books pertaining to different arenas of business and management. Picking up a book to read is the first step to learning. As Winston Churchill said, “If you cannot read all your books…fondle them — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.”
