The 100 Best Business Books of All Time - Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten

All this while I've been trying to read and pen down my thoughts on all the good books on leadership and business. I felt that this was a good way to capture as much of the knowledge, expertise and perspectives out there as I can, short of being out there in the private sector and experiencing it for myself. I am a firm believer that in the knowledge economy today, knowledge (duh) is the source of power and differentiation. He who accumulates knowledge and experience in the fastest and most effective way will have an edge. (Of course there has to be a balance between reading and actually doing!)

Only after reading through the introduction of this book did I realise that there were 11,000 business books published in 2007 alone. How can I even hope to obtain 1% of all that knowledge that is stored within these books? Reading a book like "The 100 Best Business Books of All Time" definitely helps as it compresses the themes of 100 books into 1 - saving me the time needed to read all the books. But a summary inevitably misses out on certain things in the books. Even after reading "The 100 Best Business Books", I still feel like I don't really know the 100 books at all, but only snippets of inf0rmation.

Nevertheless, I've penned down some of what I think are the useful lessons that I've picked up from the book here:
(i) From Getting Things Done: productivity comes from a quiet state of mental being.
(ii) From the Effective Executive: a leader's job is to make decisions about committing resources to the possibilities of tomorrow.
(iii) From 7 Habits: four areas that need constant renewal - the physical, the mental, the spiritual and the social/emotional.
(iv) From The Power of Intuition: Intuition is the way we translate experience into action.
(v) From The Radical Leap: extreme leadership is the pursuit of the OS!M.
(vi) From Good to Great: pushing on a giant flywheel - change and effort takes time to materialise.
(vii) From Zag: when everyone zigs, zag.
(viii) From The Great Game of Business: Open-Book Management - sharing all of a company's financial data with employees.
(ix) From The Art of the Start: belief in what you are doing is as important as competence and experience.
(x) From The E-Myth Revisited: build a company that is systems-dependent, rather than people-dependent.