Best Business Books | 10 Best Books for Business

1. The Business Book

Author : DK

The Business Book helps you over the hurdles facing every new business, such as finding a gap in the market, securing finance, employing people, and creating an eye-catching brand. It is a plain-speaking visual guide to 80 of the most important commerce theories including chaos theory, critical path analysis, market mapping, and the MABA matrix.

Its graphics and flow diagrams demystify complicated concepts and explain the ideas of seminal business thinkers, such as Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point", Michael Porter's "five forces", and Meredith Belbin's theories on effective teamwork. It shows that you can succeed with stories of rags-to-riches entrepreneurs, including the founders of Hewlett-Packard, who began their global enterprise from their garage.

Whether you are a student, a CEO, or a would-be entrepreneur, The Business Book will inspire you and put you on the inside track to making your goal a reality.

2. Before You Start Up: How to Prepare to Make Your Startup Dream a Reality

Author : Pankaj Goyal

Are you a:

“Wannabe” entrepreneur in school or college with big dreams in your eyes?

“Friday-night-after-drinks” aspiring entrepreneur in your 20s/30s?

“Ready-to-go” soon-to-be entrepreneur?

“Already-on-the-train” entrepreneur?

Loved ones of any of the above (wife/husband, boyfriend/girlfriend, friend, parents)?

An aspiring VC/angel investor who has never built a business?

This book has been especially written for you.

If you've played sports, you already know how you prepare is as important as how you play. Starting up a business is no different—it needs preparation.This preparation is about understanding your “why”; about generating and testing business ideas; about building your founding team; about talking to your family; about taking care of your career and your finances. It is about getting mentally prepared to get started.

This book will help you ask the right questions. It will guide you, steer you towards finding your answers.

You are ambitious. You are a go-getter. You are destined to win. This book will help get you what you deserve.

3. Think And Grow Rich

Author : Napoleon Hill

‘You can make your life what you want it to be.’ One of the best inspirational books ever written, Think and Grow Rich is probably the most important financial book you can ever hope to read. Inspiring generations of readers since the time it was first published, it elucidates a concrete plan for success that, when followed, never fails. A motivational self-help book, its core strength lies in the fact that at the heart of it, it is a treatise on helping individuals to do or be almost anything they want in this world.

4. The Richest Man In Babylon

Author : George S. Clason

Beloved by millions, this timeless classic holds the key to all you desire and everything you wish to accomplish. This is the book that reveals the secret to personal wealth.

Countless readers have been helped by the famous “Babylonian parables,” hailed as the greatest of all inspirational works on the subject of thrift, financial planning, and personal wealth. In language as simple as that found in the Bible, these fascinating and informative stories set you on a sure path to prosperity and its accompanying joys. Acclaimed as a modern-day classic, this celebrated bestseller offers an understanding of—and a solution to—your personal financial problems that will guide you through a lifetime. This is the book that holds the secrets to keeping your money—and making more.

5. The Psychology of Money

Author : Morgan Housel

Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In the psychology of money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters.

6. Business Adventures

Author : John Brooks

What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular moment of fame or notoriety. These notable and fascinating accounts are as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as they were when the events happened. Stories about Wall Street are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and volatile nature of the world of finance. John Brooks's insightful reportage is so full of personality and critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market crash of 1962, the collapse of a well‐known brokerage firm, or the bold attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the sense that history really does repeat itself. This business classic written by longtime New Yorker contributor John Brooks is an insightful and engaging look into corporate and financial life in America.

7. Corporate Chanakya

Author : Radhakrishnan Pillai

A pioneer of economics and political science in India, Chanakya was one of the most brilliant, tactful and shrewd economists and strategists of the Mauryan Era. Building the entire Mauryan Empire can be attributed to Chanakya's witty principles and out of the box strategies. The modern day world is a witness to innumerable business empires which need effective management to remain at par with growing competition. The author makes use of the aphorisms or sutras proposed in Chanakya's book called Arthasastra (Economics), in the management and functioning of modern day businesses.

Corporate Chanakya is divided into three major sections - Leadership, Management and Training. The author chooses the most apt sutras to provide tricks to achieve success in all these fields. in the leadership section he explains the importance of a leader's foresight, vision, enthusiasm and positive approach to handling situations. The author also gives you tips on making effective decisions, time management and creating a lasting impact to generate business.

8. The Intelligent Investor

Author :Benjamin Graham

It is a widely acclaimed book by Benjamin Graham on value investing. Written by one of the greatest investment advisers of twentieth century, the book aims at preventing potential investors from substantial errors and also teaches them strategies to achieve long-term investment goals.

Over the years, investment market has been following teachings and strategies of Graham for growth and development. In the book, Graham has explained various principles and strategies for investing safely and successfully without taking bigger risks. Modern-day investors still continue to use his proven and well-executed techniques for value investment.

The current edition highlights some of the important concepts that are useful for latest financial orders and plans. Keeping Graham's unique text in original form, the book focuses on major principles that can be applied in day-to-day life. All the concepts and principles are explained with the help of examples for better clarity and understanding of the financial world.

9. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Author : Alice Schroeder

Here is the book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom.

Although the media track him constantly, Buffett himself has never told his full life story. His reality is private, especially by celebrity standards. Indeed, while the homespun persona that the public sees is true as far as it goes, it goes only so far. Warren Buffett is an array of paradoxes. He set out to prove that nice guys can finish first. Over the years he treated his investors as partners, acted as their steward, and championed honesty as an investor, CEO, board member, essayist, and speaker. At the same time he became the world’s richest man, all from the modest Omaha headquarters of his company Berkshire Hathaway. None of this fits the term “simple.”

10. The New Rules of Business

Author : Rajesh Srivastava

Treating your customers well is no longer enough. The new rule is: employees too, have to be treated as well, if not better, than the customers. Happy employees make happy customers, and happy customers tend to be loyal.

Do you spend money in advertising to create awareness about your product? You don't need to do that any longer. The new rule is: invest in making your product so good that it does its own marketing.

New Age companies, Amazon and Flipkart, Uber and Ola, and Netflix, among others, are dismantling the old rules of business and installing new rules in their place.

This book unfolds the mysteries of these new ways of doing business which most companies try to keep under wraps. Compellingly written with several anecdotes, this is a gripping book full of incredible insights.