The Smorgasbord 250 lists the very best business and ‘smart thinking’ books published in the twenty-first century, probably. The current listing is in ‘BETA’ mode, but we will refine as we go. You can find out HERE how we compile the Smorgasbord 250. If you are in the UK and are interested in buying any of the books, can we suggest you check out bookshop.org who support local independent bookshops.
The Smorgasbord 250 [‘beta’]
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup - John Carreyrou [FT/McKinsey Winner, New York Times Bestseller, amazing].
The World for Sale: Money, Power and Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources - Javier Blas & Jack Farchy [new, Editor’s best of 2021]
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - Malcom Gladwell
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon - Brad Stone [FT/McKinsey Winner]
Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t - Jim Collins [published in 2001, but still a classic, Editor]
The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market - Philip Augar [Editor’s recommendation]
Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built - Duncan Clark
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcom Gladwell
Humanocracy: Creating Organisations as Amazing as the people Inside Them - Gary Hamel & Michele Zanini
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - Michael Lewis
Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action - Simon Sinek [Linked-in Influencer]
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis
Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Could Drive Us Apart - Rachel Botsman
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones - James Clear
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World - Liaquat Ahamed [FT/McKinsey Winner]
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More - Chris Anderson
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - Hans Rosling
Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune - Richard Branson [seems old fashioned, but sold crate loads]
Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism - Ian Bremmer [Linked-in Influencer, apparently]
The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. - William D Cohan [FT/McKinsey Winner]
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power - Steve Coll
Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance - Stephen J Dubner & Steven D Levitt
ALIEN Thinking: How to Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life - Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux & Michael Wade [new]
When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change - Mohamed El-Erian [FT/McKinsey Winner]
Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time - Keith Ferrazzi & Tahl Raz
The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment - Martin Ford
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Friedman [FT/McKinsey Winner]
Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds - Carmine Gallo
The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google - Scott Galloway
Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcom Gladwell
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men - Caroline Criado-Perez [FT/McKinsey Winner, Sunday Times listed]
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move The World - Adam Grant
Act Like a Leader Think Like A Leader - Herminia Ibarra
China Shakes The World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future and the Challenge for America - James Kynge [FT/McKinsey Winner]
More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite - Sebastian Mallaby [FT/McKinsey Winner]
The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World - Nilofer Merchant [new]
Janesville: An American Story - Amy Goldstein [FT/McKinsey Winner, NYT listed, WSJ Best Book of 2017, Economist Best Book of 2017 ]
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers - Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos - Jordan B. Peterson [over 5 million sales]
Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty [FT/McKinsey Winner]
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - Daniel H. Pink
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy - Raghuram Rajan [FT/McKinsey Winner]
Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System – and Themselves - Andrew Ross Sorkin
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty - Abhijit V.Banerjee & Esther Duflo
Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense - Rory Sutherland [newish]
Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes But Some Do - Matthew Syed
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness - Richard H Thaler
Funky Business - Jonas Ridderstrale [published in 2000, but a classic]
Non-Bullshit Innovation: Radical Ideas from the World's Smartest Minds - David Rowan (founding Editor of WIRED)
First, Break All the Rules: What the world's Greatest Managers Do Differently - Marcus Buckingham
What They Teach You At Harvard Business School - Philip Delves-Broughton
Switch: How to change things when change is hard - Chip Heath & Dan Heath
The Pheonix and the Unicorn - Peter Hinssen
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t - Simon Sinek
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity - David Allen
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert B Cialdini
The News: A User's Manual - Alain de Botton [editor’s choice from many by AdB]
The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses - Eric Ries
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants - Malcolm Gladwell
This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See - Seth Godin
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know [new] - Adam Grant
The 100 Year Life - Lynda Gratton & Andrew Scott
Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World- StephenGreen
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds - Michael Lewis
Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity - Kim Malone Scott
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life - Mark Manson [not sure, but wildly popular]
Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets - Costas Markides & Paul Geroski
Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy - Iain Martin
The Chimp Paradox: Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness - Steve Peters [not sure, but sold hugely, Ed]
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb [huh?, See Thinking Fast & Slow, Ed]
The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Timothy Ferriss [bestselling blockbuster!]
The Day After Tomorrow - Peter Hinssen
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention - Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer [new]
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance - Julia Angwin
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture - John Battellenam
Contagious: Why Things Catch On - Jonah Berger
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World - William J. Bernstein
Fast Forward: Make Your Company Fit for the Future - Julian Birkinshaw & Jonas Ridderstrale
The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company - Steve Blank
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done - Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan
Cold Steel: The Multi-billion-dollar Battle for a Global Industry - Tim Bouquet & Byron Ousey
Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business - Tiffani Bova
Small Giants: Companies that Choose to Be Great Instead of Big - Bo Burlingahm
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking - Susan Cain
ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future - Iain Carson & Vijay Vaitheeswara
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism - Anne Case & Angus Deaton [heavy, Ed]
Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration - Ed Catmull
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart - Brent Schelender & Rick Tetzeli [Editors' choice]
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust - John M Coates
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups - Daniel Coyle
Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges - Amy Cuddy
Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of technology and Turmoil - Cukier, Schonberger and Vericourt [new, from authors of Big Data]
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and ther INVENTION of a Global EMPIRE - Brad Stone [follow-up to The Everything Store]
This is How they Tell me the World Ends - Nicole Perlroth [new, shortlisted for FT/MckInsey 2021]
The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Startup Delusion - Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork - Reeves Wiedeman [new]
The New Silk Road - Peter Frankopan
Loonshots: How to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases and transform industries - Safi Bachall [new]
Listings continue, ordered alphabetically by the Author’s surname:
The Pan-Industrial Revolution: How New Manufacturing Titans Will Transform the World - Richard D’Aveni
The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life - Shawn Achor
Banking on It: How I Disrupted an Industry - Anne Boden
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 - Travis Bradberry
working backwards: Inside Stories and Secrets from Inside Amazon - Colin Bryar & Will Carr
Now, Discover Your Strengths: The revolutionary Gallup program that shows you how to develop your unique talents and strengths - Marcus Buckingham
Alive At Work: The Neuroscience of helping your people love what they do - Daniel Cable
Principles: Life and Work - Ray Dalio
Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life - Susan David
Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch - Nick Davies
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs - John Doerr
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done - Peter Drucker
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance - Angela Duckworth
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business - Charles Duhigg
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth - Amy Edmondson
The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Maths Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History - David Enrich
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - David Epstein
Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent - Sydney Finkelstein
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In - Roger Fisher
The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works—and How It's Transforming the American Economy - Charles Fishman
Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life - Stew Friedman
No Filter: How Instagram Transformed Business, Celebrity and Culture [FT/McKinsey winner]
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande
Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life - Francesca Gino
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier - Edward Glaeser
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld - Misha Glenny
This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See - Seth Godin
Clever - Gareth Jones and Rob Goffee
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful- Marshall Goldsmith
Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success - Adam Grant [new]
Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals - Heidi Grant
The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here - Lynda Gratton
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World - Alan Greenspan & Adrian Wooldridge
Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life - Hal Gregersen & Ed Catmul
Getting China and India Right - Anil Gupta & Haiyan Wang
What Matters Now - Gary Hamel
Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More - Morten Hansen
Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure - Tim Harford
Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril - Margaret Heffernan
New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World and How to Make It Work for You - Jeremy Heimans & Henry Timms
Rework: David Heinemeier & Jason Fried
Being the Boss, The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader - Linda A Hil & Kent Linebac
The Conversation: How Talking Honestly About Racism Can Transform Individuals and Organisations [new]
The Alchemists: Inside the Secret World of Central Bankers - Neil Irwin
The Art of Choosing - Sheena Iyengar
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future - Jill Lepore
Disrupt Yourself: Master Relentless Change and Speed Up Your Learning Curve - Whitney Johnson
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Blue Ocean Strategy - W. Chan & Kim Renée Mauborgne
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World - David Kirkpatrick
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike - Phil Knight
Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness - Frederic Laloux
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them - Philippe Legrain
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable - Patrick Lencioni
Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America - Christopher Leonard
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy - Lawrence Lessig
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Marc Levinson
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload - Daniel J. Levitin
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner
The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate Bullshit - Martin Lindstrom
Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong - Martin Lindstrom
Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought - Andrew W Lo
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan & Sebastian Mallaby
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity - Kim Malone Scott
Organising for the New Normal: Prepare Your Company for the Journey of Continuous Disruption - Costas Markides [new]
The Intelligence Revolution: Transforming Your Business with AI - Bernard Marr
When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic EfficiencyRoger Martin
Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works - Roger Martin & A G Lafley
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think - Viktor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier [see also new book Framers]
The Value of Everything: Who Makes and Who Takes from the Real Economy - Mariana Mazzucato
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World - Stanley McChrystal
Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen - Rita McGrath
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less - Greg McKeown
Ignore Everybody - Hugh McLeod [Editor choice]
Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry - Jacquie McNish & Sean Silcoff
The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone - Brian Merchant
The Culture Map: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures - Erin Meyer
House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again - Atif Mian & Amir Sufi
So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport
Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking - Richard E.Nisbett
Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change - Ellen Pao
The Match King - Frank Partnoy
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High - Kerry Patterson
Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life - Jordan B. Peterson [new]
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language - Steven Pinker
Creative Construction: The DNA of Sustained Innovation - Gary P Pisano
Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin - Nathaniel Popper
Key Person of Influence - Daniel Priestley [editors pick]
The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of The Galleon Hedge Fund - Anita Raghavan
The Third Pillar: The Revival of Community in a Polarised World - Raghuram Rajan
How Innovation Works - Matt Ridley
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade - Pietra Rivoli
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters - Richard Rumelt
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead - Sheryl Sandberg
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits Of Markets - Michael J Sandel
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century - Walter Scheidel
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less - Barry Schwartz
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization - Peter M Senge
Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence - William Silber
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, But Some Don't - Nate Silver
Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries - Peter Sims
Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family - Anne-Marie Slaughter
How Music Got Free: What Happens When an Entire Generation Commits the Same Crime? - Stephen Witt
DisneyWar - James B Stewart
A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond - Daniel Susskind
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything - Don Tapscott & Anthony D Williams
Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - Max Tegmark
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction) - Philip E.Tetlock
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics - RichardThaler
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel & Blake Masters
How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers - Tim Harford
Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: Marshall Van Alstyne & Geoff Parker
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future - Ashlee Vance [Editor choice]
Breaking Bad Habits - Freek Vermeulen
Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss & Tahl Raz
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams - Matthew Walker
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming - David Wallace-Wells
The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter - Michael Watkins
In Fed We Trust - David Wessel
Mutlipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter - Liz Wiseman
The Aristoracy of Talent - Adrian Wooldridge [new]
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World - DanielYergin
Smart Business: What Alibaba's Success Reveals about the Future of Strategy - Ming Zeng
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power - Zuboff
The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution - Gregory Zuckerman
Listing above, is at November 2021. We are still in BETA Mode. Full review and publication still being reviewed.