Top New Business Books

Business leaders don’t usually want to learn lessons the hard way through trial and error. But you also don’t have the time to read a whole library and see what connects with you. We’re here to separate the wheat from the chaff of the business books from the last three years.

Chaos Monkeys

by Antonio García Martínez

Part memoir, part business advice, this gender bender is both an enjoyable and practical read. While many business books keep their ideas objective and generalizable, García Martínez’s takes us for a romp through Silicon Valley in his shoes. From unrelenting zoo analogies to discarded toothbrush wrappers, the tech start-up world is lain bare in all its glory and minutia.

That doesn’t mean there’s any shortage of lessons to be learned to apply to your own walk of life. If you want to learn how much leadership comes down to managing different personalities and dynamics, there’s few better books to read. And peppered with zingers like “There are worse ways of monetizing sociopathy than startup,” it’s just plain funny.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

by Timothy Ferriss

It’s no accident I chose two book that hail from entirely opposite ends of the spectrum. Tribe of Mentors offers bite-sized advice from a broad spectrum of perspectives, mainly focused on how those who succeed manage their personal lives.

With advice ranging from the theological (“we are all mini-gods”) to the quotidian (journal every day), the book offers both habits to instill in your everyday life and quick exercises to try once (take an Enneagram test). With over 100 “top performers” interviewed, there is no shortage of options to deploy or discard at your discretion, and that is the true draw for this sort of book to me.

It serves as a real palate cleanser to more polemical books that are either with your or against you.