A handful of timeless business how-tos and must-reads
Todd Ordal //April 21, 2017//
A handful of timeless business how-tos and must-reads
Todd Ordal //April 21, 2017//
My sous chef Alexa and I were cooking dinner the other night, and I asked her, “Alexa, play top songs from 1981.” (I didn’t say please. I know she’s artificial intelligence, but I still feel guilty.) This was the year our first child was born. After listening to about 10 of those songs, I moved on to the subsequent birth years of our other children. Quite a hoot! On the plus side, Kool & the Gang, Bill Withers, Hall & Oates, Marvin Gaye and Prince – need I say more? But I also had to suffer through some big-hair bands and sappy stuff.
Luckily I could instruct Alexa to “skip this song.”
After dinner, I went to my home office. As I passed my bookshelf, it occurred to me that my book collection had the equivalent of Prince, but also some Wham! (“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”). (You should be suspicious of a band that has to add an exclamation point to its name.)
I have a habit of throwing away books that fail the wackadoodle standard, so have more Prince than Wham!, but I was reflecting on what has changed in the leadership world in my soon-to-be 40 years in business.
I wish I had a dollar for every book that was just rehashed Peter Drucker. He’s the Prince of my business bookshelf. I have a copy of his book “Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices” from 1973 that’s just about as wonderful today as it was back then.
Warning! It’s more than 800 pages long because it was written in the days before Twitter, when detailed thought and analysis were appreciated.
Want something even more timeless? Drucker’s book “Concept of the Corporation,” originally published in 1946, and the updated version ought to be taught in all business schools.
In no particular order, here are a few other favorites that’ve held up well:
I have more, but these are the ones that called out to me from my bookshelf, like Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us,” did from my radio in 1981.