Curated Reading List
Best Business Books
Strategy, leadership, and company-building wisdom from the people who actually built them.
39 business books • Links are affiliate (details below)
Business Adventures
by John Brooks
“Bill Gates and I both agree this is the best business book we've ever read.”Buy on Amazon
The Outsiders
by William N. Thorndike
“An outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation.”Buy on Amazon
Built to Last
by Jim Collins
“This book helped shape my thinking about building Amazon as a long-term company.”Buy on Amazon
The Innovator's Dilemma
by Clayton M. Christensen
“A really fantastic book. It's deeply influenced my thinking about business strategy.”Buy on Amazon
Good to Great
by Jim Collins
“I had all my senior executives read it. The concept of the Flywheel is critical.”Buy on Amazon
The End of Power
by Moises Naim
“The book explores how power is shifting from large established entities to smaller nimble ones in every area of life.”Buy on Amazon
Principles
by Ray Dalio
“I believe that having principles that work is essential for getting what we want out of life.”Buy on Amazon
Zero to One
by Peter Thiel
“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network.”Buy on Amazon
$100M Offers
by Alex Hormozi
“Make people an offer so good they would feel stupid saying no.”Buy on Amazon
The Art of Strategy
by Avinash K. Dixit
“Strategic thinking is about looking beyond the obvious. This book teaches you to think several moves ahead.”Buy on Amazon
How Google Works
by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg
“The key lesson: attract the best smart creatives, then get out of their way.”Buy on Amazon
The Ride of a Lifetime
by Robert Iger
“Iger's story of transforming Disney through acquisitions and bold bets resonates with building NVIDIA.”Buy on Amazon
The Art of the Deal
by Donald J. Trump
“I read this early on. Trump understood branding before anyone in real estate. LVMH is the same principle applied to luxury.”Buy on Amazon
In Search of Excellence
by Tom Peters
“Peters identified what separates great companies from merely good ones. At LVMH, we pursue nothing less than excellence.”Buy on Amazon
The HP Way
by David Packard
“Packard's management philosophy at HP was decades ahead. It's the blueprint for building a company that lasts.”Buy on Amazon
Only the Paranoid Survive
by Andrew S. Grove
“Andy Grove was the best CEO in tech history. This book explains strategic inflection points better than anything I've read.”Buy on Amazon
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
by Ben Horowitz
“Horowitz tells the truth about building companies. There's no playbook — you make it up as you go. That resonates deeply with NVIDIA's journey.”Buy on Amazon
Amp It Up
by Frank Slootman
“Slootman's intensity about raising the bar is exactly the philosophy that drives NVIDIA. Good enough is never good enough.”Buy on Amazon
The Box
by Marc Levinson
“A book about shipping containers that's really about how infrastructure changes everything. Stripe is a container for internet payments.”Buy on Amazon
Play Nice But Win
by Michael Dell
“I wrote about taking Dell private and public again. The biggest leveraged buyout in tech history. Sometimes you have to blow up the playbook.”Buy on Amazon
Competitive Strategy
by Michael E. Porter
“Porter's five forces framework is the foundation of strategic thinking. I used it to understand how Dell could compete against IBM and Compaq.”Buy on Amazon
What It Takes
by Stephen A. Schwarzman
“I wrote this because I wanted to share everything I learned building Blackstone. Go big. The effort is the same whether you're solving a small problem or a large one.”Buy on Amazon
The Practice of Management
by Peter F. Drucker
“Drucker is my teacher. I have read every word he has written. Management is about making people productive — that insight built Uniqlo.”Buy on Amazon
One Win Nine Losses
by Tadashi Yanai
“I titled my book after my track record. For every success, I've had nine failures. The key is that you learn from each one and keep going.”Buy on Amazon
The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
“Smith understood 250 years ago what India is proving today — free markets and specialization create prosperity at scale.”Buy on Amazon
Getting Things Done
by David Allen
“Allen's system is the foundation of Asana. Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. We built a company around that principle.”Buy on Amazon
The Innovator's Dilemma
by Clayton M. Christensen
“Christensen explains why great companies fail. At Tencent, we disrupt ourselves before someone else does. WeChat replaced QQ — our own product.”Buy on Amazon
High Output Management
by Andrew S. Grove
“Grove's management system is the most efficient I've seen. At ByteDance, we scaled to 100,000 employees using principles from this book.”Buy on Amazon
My Years with General Motors
by Alfred P. Sloan
“Sloan built the modern corporation at GM. The organizational principles he created apply directly to how BMW operates as a family-influenced enterprise.”Buy on Amazon
The 4-Hour Workweek
by Timothy Ferriss
“Glen Rating: 10. This helped me see that school and institutions encourage like-minded thinking. You can make a living or make a fortune. Common sense is uncommon. School teaches you to be an employee, not to be rich.”Buy on Amazon
Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers
by Gerald A. Michaelson
“This gets you in the frame of mind that the world is for the taking. Question everything, take nothing for granted. I eagerly wait, Sun Tzu style.”Buy on Amazon
Deep Work
by Cal Newport
“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable. This book explains how to cultivate that skill.”Buy on Amazon
Measure What Matters
by John Doerr
“OKRs transformed Google from a garage startup into a trillion-dollar company. Doerr's system for setting and achieving audacious goals is the operating system for high-growth companies.”Buy on Amazon
Creativity, Inc.
by Ed Catmull
“Catmull's insights on building a creative culture at Pixar are invaluable. The best book on managing creative people and sustaining innovation inside large organizations.”Buy on Amazon
The Lean Startup
by Eric Ries
“Build, measure, learn. Ries revolutionized how startups think about product development. The MVP concept alone has saved billions of dollars in wasted engineering effort.”Buy on Amazon
The Effective Executive
by Peter F. Drucker
“Drucker's classic on executive productivity is required reading at Amazon. Effectiveness can be learned — and this book teaches it in under 200 pages.”Buy on Amazon
The Fifth Discipline
by Peter M. Senge
“Senge's framework for building learning organizations changed how Gates thought about scaling Microsoft. Systems thinking is the meta-skill every leader needs.”Buy on Amazon
The Personal MBA
by Josh Kaufman
“Skip the $200K MBA — Kaufman distills the core concepts of business into one readable volume. Every entrepreneur should read this before spending a dime on business school.”Buy on Amazon
Barbarians at the Gate
by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
“The definitive account of the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout — the deal that defined an era. A masterclass in corporate greed, Wall Street deal-making, and the power of leverage.”Buy on Amazon
Why These Books?
This list is not a generic roundup scraped from the internet. Every book here was either recommended in a public interview, annual letter, or book club by a billionaire investor — or it comes from Glen Bradford's personal reading list, built over 15+ years of concentrated value investing. Whether you are just getting started or looking for the next book that changes how you see the world, this is the list.
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Disclosure: Links on this page go to Amazon and include an affiliate tag. If you buy something, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Book recommendations are sourced from publicly available interviews, annual letters, and book clubs. Attributions may be paraphrased or reflect secondhand reporting — we do our best but can't guarantee perfect accuracy. These attributions do not imply endorsement of this site by any individual listed. This page was compiled with AI assistance.
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