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 First published in 2018 by Nicholas Brealey Publishing
An imprint of John Murray Press

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Tom Butler-Bowdon 2018

The right of Tom Butler-Bowdon to be identified as the Author of the Work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 857 88675 7

eBook (UK) ISBN 978 1 473 68391 4
eBook (US) ISBN 978 1 473 68392 1

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 Praise for

50 Business Classics

“Nobody explains the gist of books better than Tom ButlerBowdon, as he

demonstrates to great effect in 50 Business Classics. He curates essential
wisdom written by leading practitioners, such as Richard Branson, Howard
Schultz, and Sheryl Sandberg, the most astute observers (Peter Drucker, Jim
Collins, and others), and master storytellers such as Walter Isaacson and
Ron Chernow. The revelations about the creation of wealth, the changing
nature of work and employment, and the impact of technological
advancements are timely, practical, and relevant.”

Bruce Rosenstein, Managing Editor, Leader to Leader; Author, Create Your

Future the Peter Drucker Way

“Teaching management, I’m always looking for ways to distil knowledge

for the benefit of my students. 50 Business Classics provides an excellent
base of management history, mission and goal development, and ethics.
Highly recommended as a tool for business and personal growth.”

Lawrence J. Danks, Assistant Professor of Business, Camden County

College, New Jersey, author of Your Unfinished Life
Contents

Title Page
Copyright
Praise for 50 Business Classics
Introduction

1 P. T. Barnum – The Art of Money Getting (1880)

There are no shortcuts to business success; good character is everything
2 Richard Branson – Losing My Virginity (1998)
Don’t be afraid to be different. On entering any new field or an industry,
aim to shake it up and provide new value
3 Andrew Carnegie – The Gospel of Wealth (1899)
The wealth creator has a moral obligation to enrich the lives of others in
whatever way they can
4 Alfred Chandler – The Visible Hand (1977)
It is not entrepreneurship but management that has brought the greatest
advances in business
5 Ron Chernow – Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1998)
Society’s interests are best served by giant monopolies which provide
quality and lower prices for the consumer
6 Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997)
Businesses must purposefully engage in “disruptive innovation” if they
are to survive and prosper
7 Duncan Clark – Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built (2016)
Don’t be cowed by the big players in your industry. Vision, patience, and
agility can see you outpace them
8 Jim Collins – Great by Choice (2011)
Great companies outperform even in turbulent times
9 W. Edwards Deming – Out of the Crisis (1982)
 Enterprises with an extreme focus on quality, better systems and constant
improvement have the edge
10 Peter Drucker – The Effective Executive (1967)
Effectiveness at work depends on clarity of aims and the desire to
contribute
11 Roger Fisher, William Ury & Bruce Patton – Getting To Yes (2011)
Successful negotiation is based on principles, not pressure
12 Martin Ford – Rise of the Robots (2015)
Automation and artificial intelligence will change the landscape of work
and production forever
13 Michael E. Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited (2001)
The key to real prosperity in business is to work on your enterprise, not
in it
14 Conrad Hilton – Be My Guest (1957)
Faith in your idea and thinking big are essential to building a great
business
15 Ben Horowitz – The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014)
Nothing really prepares you for leading an organization and getting it
through the inevitable crises
16 Walter Isaacson – Steve Jobs (2011)
A great vision can require shocking intensity to realize
17 Josh Kaufman – The Personal MBA (2010)
You don’t have to spend a fortune getting a good business education
18 Guy Kawasaki – The Art of the Start (2004)
The fundamental purpose in starting any new enterprise is to create
meaning
19 John Kay – Obliquity (2010)
Companies that put profits before mission inevitably falter in the long-
term
20 Stuart Kells – Penguin and the Lane Brothers (2015)
Build an enterprise that uplifts people or opens up knowledge to millions
21 W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne – Blue Ocean Strategy (2005)
Companies make the mistake of focusing on the competition when they
should be focused on creating big leaps in value
22 Phil Knight – Shoe Dog (2016)
A great businesses can be the result of a personal passion writ large
23 Richard Koch & Greg Lockwood – Simplify (2016)
It is the radical simplifiers of products and services, rather than the
innovators, that win the big prizes in business
24 Terry Leahy – Management in Ten Words (2012)
Simplicity and clarity are the most powerful advantages in business, but
you only arrive at them by being radically customer-centric
25 Patrick Lencioni – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002)
The best teams trust each other, welcome conflict, are accountable, and
focus on results
26 Marc Levinson – The Box (2006)
How a simple innovation, the shipping container, transformed world
trade
27 Theodore Levitt – Marketing Myopia (1960)
Truly understand what business you are in, and you have a chance of
shaping your future
28 Stanley McChrystal – Team of Teams (2015)
Transparency of information enables people to make good decisions and
creates unity of purpose
29 Douglas McGregor – The Human Side of Enterprise (1960)
People will naturally want to do their best for an organization if they feel
that their higher personal development goals are being met
30 Geoffrey A. Moore – Crossing the Chasm (1991)
Attracting early adopters to your product does not mean you will capture
the mainstream market
31 Tom Rath & Barry Conchie – Strengths Based Leadership (2008)
 Maximizing your strengths, not trying to correct for your weaknesses, is
the key to work success
32 Al Ries & Jack Trout – Positioning (1981)
Successful companies don’t simply sell products, they occupy very
specific spaces in people’s minds
33 Eric Ries – The Lean Startup (2011)
A lack of resources can be a boon in creating new enterprises, with
experimentation and analysis replacing grand strategy and capital
34 Sheryl Sandberg – Lean In (2013)
More women at the top is not just good for its own sake, companies will
only succeed if they are properly representative of half of their market
35 Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg – How Google Works (2015)
Only by creating a culture of learning and innovation will you attract the
right people to your enterprise
36 Alice Schroeder – The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of
Life (2008)
Time, discipline, and focus are the most important ingredients in building
a fortune
37 Howard Schultz – Pour Your Heart Into It (1997)
Huge enterprises can be built by giving people a small moment of joy in
their day
38 Peter Senge – The Fifth Discipline (1990)
Great companies are communities in which there is a genuine
commitment to every member’s potential being realized
39 Simon Sinek – Start With Why (2009)
Average companies are focused on “what” they produce. Great business
leaders inspire people to take action by galvanizing them behind a
compelling reason, a “why”
40 Seema Singh – Mythbreaker: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and the Story of
Indian Biotech (2016)
Advanced industries can emerge in unlikely environments
41 Alfred P. Sloan – My Years with General Motors (1963)
A new breed of huge corporation required a different kind of management
42 Brad Stone – The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of
Amazon (2013)
Relentless innovation to please the customer and a very long-term view
created a dominant online retailer
43 Matthew Syed – Black Box Thinking (2015)
Willingness to fail frequently, while absorbing the lessons of failure and
making constant adjustments, is the way to business success
44 Frederick Winslow Taylor – The Principles of Scientific Management
(1911)
Dramatic increases in productivity benefit capital and labor alike
45 Peter Thiel – Zero To One (2014)
To grow faster, the world needs transformative technology and business
models
46 Robert Townsend – Up the Organization (1970)
People are most motivated and successful at work when they are left to
do their thing and treated as human beings
47 Donald Trump – The Art of the Deal (1987)
To succeed in business, balance boldness and promotion with patience,
caution and flexibility
48 Ashlee Vance – Elon Musk (2015)
The visionary entrepreneur should not just create a business but shape
the future
49 Jack Welch – Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)
Never underestimate how far you can go by just being yourself
50 James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones & Daniel Roos – The Machine
that Changed the World (1990)
New practices in manufacturing and management have saved vast
resources and brought higher quality goods
50 More Business Classics
Credits
Acknowledgments
About the Author
 Introduction

“People always overestimate how complex business is. This isn’t

rocket science—we’ve chosen one of the world’s most simple
professions.”
Jack Welch, former head of General Electric

50 Business Classics is a mix of intriguing theories, real-life examples,

and salutary stories aimed at getting you thinking more deeply about
business. From genuine historical classics that still carry meaning, to the
best of recent writings, the aim is to pick out the most important ideas that
can help you come up with a worthy idea, turn it into a business, and
strategize your way to success.
Most business books contain only one or two major ideas; the rest of the
pages simply fill out the argument with illustrations and examples. On the
assumption that a single idea remembered is more powerful than a set of
concepts and examples stored somewhere in your notebook or computer, I
have tried to cut through the texts and capture the essence for you. Writing
about expensive business degrees such as MBAs, the marketing thinker
Seth Godin once wrote, “it’s hard for me to understand why this is a better
use of time and money than actual experience combined with a dedicated
reading of 30 or 40 books.” 50 Business Classics does not claim to be an
alternative to doing a comprehensive course of business study, but it may
save you a lot of time trawling through many of the texts you feel you
should have read, but haven’t. Business may not be rocket science, but it is
full of ideas, any one of which could transform how you do things or help
you discover the next big thing. This book is a shortcut to those ideas.
Is business an art, a science, a discipline, or a practice? When, in the
early twentieth century, business schools started springing up, and
management emerged as a field of study in its own right, many claims were
made that it could be “scientific.” And yet, business did not become a
science, or even a social science. One reason is that the main unit of
analysis, the company, comes in billions of different shapes, sizes, and
flavors, and with different people involved, so it is a bit of a stretch to
generalize “laws” from one business to the next. Another is that companies
exist in markets which are constantly changing: no sooner do you get a
picture of what that market looks like than it is disrupted, disappears, or
bifurcates into more specialized fields. Just as economists have found when
looking at economies, anything that rides on human expectations and
motivations is hard to pin down and properly analyze. Business is no
different.
Though it can never be a proper science, business is at the same time
something more than an art. “Practice” is the best word. There are some
insights, practices, and ways of thinking which do seem to hold true across
companies and markets, and it has been through the business literature that
they have been identified and disseminated. A good business book is one
that provides new ideas for how things can be done, using examples of
successful execution that you can apply to your own organization. A great
business book not only does this, but also fires the imagination, promising
some kind of leap forward or breakthrough. The business book genre has
sometimes been accused of being too inspirational, with not enough
statistical foundation, but sometimes a bit of motivation is all we need to
kick off some new enterprise which might change the world in some way,
making people’s lives easier, more productive, or more beautiful. Such
noble intentions can make business a vocation as much as a career, because
in striving to provide something of value we transform ourselves in the
process.

A quick tour of the literature

The titles covered in this volume can be grouped according to three broad
themes:

• Entrepreneurship & Innovation

• Management, Leadership & Effectivenesss
• Strategy & Marketing
 Entrepreneurship & Innovation
Richard Branson Losing My Virginity
Ron Chernow Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Duncan Clark Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built
Martin Ford Rise of the Robots
Michael E. Gerber The E-Myth Revisited
Conrad Hilton Be My Guest
Ben Horowitz The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs
Guy Kawasaki The Art of the Start
Stuart Kells Penguin and the Lane Brothers
Phil Knight Shoe Dog
Marc Levinson The Box
Eric Ries The Lean Startup
Howard Schultz Pour Your Heart Into It
Seema Singh Mythbreaker
Brad Stone The Everything Store
Peter Thiel Zero To One
Donald Trump The Art of the Deal
Ashlee Vance Elon Musk

The “origin stories” of businesses—accounts of the early days of significant

companies such as Virgin, Apple, Penguin, Tesla, Nike, Starbucks, Amazon,
and Alibaba—may not be scientific, but they are often very inspiring. It is
easy to look at a large corporation or chain of restaurants or hotels, or a
successful online platform, and see its rise as having been inevitable.
Usually it was anything but, and only unscientific grit, passion, luck, and
faith pushed people forward after the initial enthusiasm, through frequent
troubles, to achieve something they still believed in. One only has to read
the stories of Nike’s Phil Knight, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, and Starbucks’
Howard Schultz to appreciate what a white-knuckle ride business can be,
even after a brand has become known. As venture capitalist Ben Horowitz
points out in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, the world is full of good
business ideas, but it is execution that ultimately matters. No one can
understand what it is like to run a company until they are in that position,
and his book looks at the psychological costs of leadership that few talk
about.
Often it is only the size of the initial vision that keeps an entrepreneur
going. In Losing My Virginity, Richard Branson notes how he has never
gone into a business purely to make money; it has to change the way things
are done in some way, and it has to be fun. Ashlee Vance’s biography of
Elon Musk reveals a person driven to change the world through electric cars
and affordable space travel. As a character, Musk is uncannily like the late
Steve Jobs in his intense demands on people to achieve almost impossible
things. Both truly fit the description “visionary” in terms of their ability to
shape the future and build entirely new products and even industries, not
just reacting to what the rest of their peers are doing. Indeed, in Zero To
One, PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel bemoans what he
sees as a trend away from vision and toward incrementalism or tinkering.
What the world really needs is transformative products and whole new
industries that can solve some of the biggest problems. Ironically, this can
be achieved with seemingly mundane inventions. In The Box, Marc
Levinson tells how the invention of the shipping container had a huge
impact on world trade, eliminating wastefulness in ports and linking up
global supply chains as never before.
John D. Rockefeller’s relentless push to dominate the oil industry has
often been painted as an exercise in greed, but his efforts to standardize oil
quality, making it safer and more uniform, paved the way for the
automobile age. Neither should we lessen the achievements of retail
innovators such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s masterstroke of having
millions of user ratings of products helped make buying decisions more
objective, while reducing prices and making purchasing safe. Jack Ma’s
Taobao and Tmall websites have done a similar thing for Chinese retail,
which until Alibaba was characterized by an unappetizing combination of
state-owned department stores, small shops, and street markets.
The raison d’être of every entrepreneur and innovator is surely to lift up
humanity in some way while making a profit. There are few better
examples than the Lane brothers’ leap of faith to launch, in 1935, a new
“Penguin” book series of top-flight writing at a tiny price. Suddenly, people
on low incomes could afford to educate and elevate themselves, and for
their part, the Lanes were able to get rich and create one of the first global
media businesses.
If you are able to begin a new enterprise, you can save yourself a lot of
wasted resources by reading great start-up books. Guy Kawasaki’s The Art
of the Start remains popular, as does Michael E. Gerber’s reminder in The
E-Myth Revisited to avoid getting overwhelmed by the nitty-gritty of
running a business. Finally, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup articulates the
incremental, iterative approach to innovation, which provides a reality
check on ego-driven ideas that look good on paper but won’t fly in reality.
As all great entrepreneurs know, business success comes from a curious
mix of blue sky thinking and a love of feedback and data.

Management & Leadership

P. T. Barnum The Art of Money-Getting
Andrew Carnegie The Gospel of Wealth
Alfred Chandler The Visible Hand
W. Edwards Deming Out of the Crisis
Peter Drucker The Effective Executive
Roger Fisher, William Ury & Bruce Patton Getting To Yes
Josh Kaufman The Personal MBA
Terry Leahy Management in Ten Words
Patrick Lencioni The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Stanley McChrystal Team of Teams
Douglas McGregor The Human Side of Enterprise
Tom Rath & Barry Conchie Strengths Based Leadership
Sheryl Sandberg Lean In
Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg How Google Works
Alice Schroeder The Snowball
Peter Senge The Fifth Discipline
Alfred P. Sloan My Years with General Motors
Matthew Syed Black Box Thinking
Frederick Winslow Taylor The Principles of Scientific Management
Robert Townsend Up the Organization
Jack Welch Jack: Straight from the Gut