One of the difficulties in choosing which books to include in this compilation was evaluating the accessibility of the book itself versus the value of the idea contained within. There are many superb ideas that don’t translate well into the book form, and there are thousands of books whose ideas never should have been published at that length.
Two books in particular deserve mention for the quality of their ideas, but are ones we cannot recommend in their popular book form. In both cases, the book is dense. The diligent reader is welcome to pursue the original works, but let us suggest more practical routes to accessing their valuable ideas.
The Best Route to an Idea
Michael Porter’s
Five Forces of Strategy
Porter’s defining work on competitive strategy is arguably the most important development of business theory in the last three decades. Business students can recite, from memory, the five forces (now repeat with me: suppliers, customers, competitors, substitutes, and new entrants). Porter’s book, Competitive Strategy, provides an exhaustive 592-page academic view of the material, inappropriate for the majority of readers.
Start instead with Porter’s
“The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy,” the
2008 revised version of the original article he wrote for
Harvard Business Review in 1979. It encompasses all the
basics of competitive strategy in nineteen pages.
Peter Senge’s
Learning Organizations
Upon cracking open Senge’s best-selling The Fifth Discipline, the casual reader is seduced by the fluidity of the opening chapter, only to find himself bogged down in the author’s impenetrable writing style. Senge’s primary insight that organizations compete by learning faster than their counterparts builds on the works of Chris Argyris and bears consideration in the discussion of pinnacle business thought.
The way to painlessly access the
material is with The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and
The Dance of Change. Written by Senge and a team of
writers, both paperback titles are filled with essays, sidebars,
and exercises that make The Fifth Discipline concepts a
pleasure to absorb.
Written by Todd Sattersten
