The Best Business Books to Read This Winter

Hey you . . . you saw the title. You get the deal. You’re smart. You’ve made a few dollars. You’ve done what the financial books and websites tell you to do. So why isn’t it working? Maybe emotions and expectations are getting in the way of good sense—or you’re paying attention to the wrong people. If you’ve started counting your lattes, for god’s sake, just stop. Read this book instead.

A set of tools for mastering the one skill standing between us and success: the ability to ask for the things we need to succeed. Here, Wayne Baker shares a set of strategies—used at companies like Google, GM, and IDEO—that individuals, teams, and leaders can use to make asking for help a personal and organizational habit.

It’s time to ditch the industrial age playbook of leadership. In Leadership is Language, you’ll learn how choosing your words can dramatically improve decision-making and execution on your team to achieve such transformational leadership in their organizations.

From the authors of the #1 New York Times best seller Designing Your Life (“Life has questions. They have answers” —The NYT)–a job-changing, outlook-changing, life-changing book that shows us how to transform our work lives and create a dream job that is meaningful without necessarily changing the job we have.

In Selling Naked, Hubble Contacts co-founder and co-CEO Jesse Horwitz shows entrepreneurs and enterprise companies alike precisely how to conceive, launch, and grow an e-commerce brand by using paid marketing social media channels. It is the definitive playbook on how to start up a successful direct-to-consumer business.

Bestselling author, entrepreneur, speaker, and life and business coach Romi Neustadt has a message for women: You CAN have it all–just not at the same damn time. Romi provides a no-BS blueprint for women to figure out what to focus on and what not to. She explains why saying YES to everything and everyone really means saying NO to the things that matter — to your goals, your dreams, and your true self.

In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world’s most successful organizations—including the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs—and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation, and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind.

What is blockchain? What is Bitcoin? How can central banks be instrumental in guiding a nation’s economy? What are the underlying causes of trade deficits? Do trade wars actually help the domestic economy? How has the behavior of millennials and Generation Z affected the global economy? Find out all this and more in this definitive guide to the world economy.

In an era when corporate profits have soared while wages have flatlined, millions of Americans are searching for ways to improve their lives, and they’re often turning to labor unions and worker action. From the longtime New York Times labor correspondent, this is an in-depth look at working men and women in America, the challenges they face, and how they can be re-empowered.

He has had unprecedented access to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg for three years. And now renowned tech writer Steven Levy delivers the definitive history of one of America’s most powerful and controversial companies: Facebook.

In The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger shares the lessons he’s learned while running Disney and leading its 200,000 employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership. This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger for forty-five years, since the day he started as the lowliest studio grunt at ABC.

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society. In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so.

From Microsoft’s president and one of the tech industry’s broadest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. When your technology changes the world, do you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create?

Once we recognize our negativity bias, the rational brain can overcome the power of bad when it’s harmful and employ that power when it’s beneficial. In fact, bad breaks and bad feelings create the most powerful incentives to become smarter and stronger. Properly understood, bad can be put to perfectly good use.