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.
