I confess I am often on an unrequited quest to impress my daughters with my technical know-how, my online savvy, and my never-ending recommendations for books.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. My girls are quite often grateful and always proud they have a librarian for a mother. I’ve heard them “name-drop” my career many times. Yet, perhaps it was that time they asked me why I, their grown mother, had enrolled in graduate school “to learn how to alphabetize books” that made me insecure. Yes, they were bratty teens at the time but it has taken me well over a decade to overcome my fear of their cynicism.
Certainly one the best compliments I’ve ever received was from my youngest daughter. She confessed to a friend that she used to groan when she asked me for help on a school project.
“My mother didn’t give me just one resource – she gave me a table full of books,” she’d explain. “It wasn’t until I was in college that I fully appreciated how much I knew about research.”
I am sure I beamed with pride that day…right before fainting from complete and utter shock that I had taught her something useful. (Full disclosure here is that I home schooled that youngest daughter from fourth through sixth grades and we both had more than ample opportunities to groan and moan.)
And so, in true librarian-mother form, I decided to make up a bibliography of must-read business books for my youngest daughter, already in an MBA program, and for the eldest who will begin next fall.
There were plenty of places to go online to gather information for this list. Some of the best online spots are Business Week Online, Personal MBA, Forbes, etc. However, as often is the case, I might have actually found a good answer right on our shelves. It’s “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You” by Jack Covert and Todd Satterson.
This handy book has reviews of books from one of my personal favorites, Jim Collins’ “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t,” to “Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, to simply Dr. Seuss’s “Oh the Places You’ll Go.”
Although “The “100 Best Books” was published in February and it is quite up-to-date, it narrows the playing field to an amazingly square plot of business book real estate. Did you know that over 10,000 business books are published each year? Many of those books have a relatively short lifespan – they are often relevant only a year or two. Today’s book on the financial meltdown is very nearly old news just as 2007’s “Real Estate Investing for Dummies” might have held bad advice by late 2008.
Every year Library Journal publishes a list of the best business books. 2008’s list included David Price’s “The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company” and Randall Stross’s “Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know.” Business Week lists the top best business books each year and Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” made their list in 2008. In the book Ariely theorizes that nearly everyone makes decision that go against his or her best interest.
Another of the best books of 2008 was Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Outliers,” espousing the theory that success can just be a special combination of forces and the right time and place.
Perhaps the best book I can recommend to my back-to-school daughters in this crazy world is John Medina’s “Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School.” In a 2009 reprint, this book explores Medina’s lifelong research about the brain and how it works. Rule #4? “We don’t pay attention to boring things,” Medina writes, professing that multi-tasking is nearly impossible because we truly are paying attention to only one thing at a time. (Go to brainrulesbook.com for some great online information.)
This might be the best book of advice I can recommend to my daughters in this digital, virtual, multi-tasking age. And while I think of it, I’ll turn off my iPod, put my coffee cup down, minimize my online browser, answer that ringing phone, and save this column to disk.
Looking for a great business book? Visit our Web site, www. norwoodlibrary.org, or call 781-769-0200. We look forward to seeing you in the library.
Charlotte Canelli is library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood.
