Best Business Books of 2023
The Best Business Books of 2023
The number one book on this list is not a book about AI.
This is not due to the lack of effort. More was written on AI on this year than any previous year, tons of books, and that does not even include all the guide’s to ChatGPT written by ChatGPT.
And I read them all, every fearmongering, dystopian report, every utopian dream. I even read many, rather boring overviews on what’s up with AI.
But none of these books even came near the top of the list. The topic is simply too interesting, it is too fast-changing, new services and use cases are emerging too fast, that a book is simply not the best format to cover the phenomena, not at this early stage anyway.
Instead, the best business books of this year are rooted in the everyday work of doing business. They are about how to run a business when the times are hard, how to get challenging projects done, and how to learn to tolerate mistakes and learn from them.
Here is the top ten for 2023:
- Bent Flyvberg & Howard Gardner: How Big Things Get Done. The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between.
This is an essential book in times when financing is expensive, political decision-making is paralyzed, and there is little courage to take up ambitious projects. Bent Flyvberg is the brains of this book, the world’s leading megaproject expert, and the one to coin the iron law of megaprojects. “Over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.”
The examples in this book and the research statistics are depressing: Suez Canal, 1900% over budget; Sydney Opera House, 1400%; and developing the Concorde, 1100%.
90% of megaprojects face a similar fate. But Flyvberg reminds us that many projects get done before their due date and go under budget. These are the projects Flyvberg wants us to learn from.
Reading the book is a pleasure, thanks to the book’s second author, Howard Gardner. This is not Gardner’s first time tackling a complex issue, but he can turn boring facts into engaging stories.
2. Uri Levine: Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution.
How do you build a growth company? An intriguing question. It is hard for even the most promising growth companies to get financing when the number of bankruptcies is rising.
Uri Levine is not the first start-up founder to write a book about achieving growth. Still, he is the only one who has sold two companies he started, both for a valuation of over a billion dollars (Waze, driving directions and live traffic app, sold to Google in 2013: Moovit, the real-time public transportation app, sold to Intel in 2022). Other companies founded by Levine are in the process of being sold, so the guy has a good playbook for growth and increasing the value of his companies.
The main strength of his book is how to the point, straight-shooting, and precise it is. What is essential? What complicated things do you need to solve first? What should you focus on? Levine’s main thought is straightforward: find a problem that pisses you off. Make sure that it also pisses off loads of other people. And focus on solving that problem. Keep your eyes on solving that problem, and other things will fall into place.
3. Amy Edmondson: The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.
Third on this year’s list is the Financial Times’ Best Business Book of the Year winner. Amy Edmondson is a superstar in organizational studies, best known for her theory of psychological safety. In her new book, she tackles failure, how we are bad at it, don’t know how to deal with it, and, in general, are unable to handle it constructively.
The subject is important, and the thinking is crisp, but the prose style is a tad wooden. Still, it is highly recommended. It makes you think.
4. Esha Chhabra: Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Regenerative Business to Heal the World
When companies compete on who’s the most sustainable, everybody wins. The competition is, however, getting more brutal, and the rules are getting stricter. EU’s new sustainability reporting legislation comes into play in 2024, and new laws are being drafted to make greenwashing in communications harder. The transition period is a goldmine for consultants and accountants.
But there is also a need for a new, deeper, more supply chain-based approach to sustainability — journalist Esha Chabba’s book about regenerative business, Working to Restore.
It is all about soil, new regenerative ways to farm foods, waste and how to better utilize it, and about the supply chain. The examples in the book are about companies that already act in exemplary ways.
5. Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk
I know many people I respect have decided not to read this book. They have been appalled by Musk’s recent actions and statements, and they feel that they are somehow protesting against him by not reading.
I would read the biography of the devil himself if Walter Isaacson wrote it, so I’m not participating in this boycott, nor should I feel you. It is much too intriguing to know what, for example, happened at Twitter when Elon took over.
For those of you who have read Ashlee Vance’s biography from 2015, there is little radically new information, but in the seven years since, the story has gotten darker. Musk has become the world’s richest man, and his self-destructive impulses have grown stronger.
At its best, the book is strong evidence of the power of the vision. At its worst, it is a “how-not-to-do-it -book” on managing human beings.
6. Zeke Faux: Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall Hardcover
While there have not been any genuinely brilliant books on AI’s latest hype cycle, there have been several brilliant books about the rise and fall of crypto.
They are all plagued by a bad case of hindsight and holier-than-thou moralizing, which are, in this case, entirely justified.
The best of this bunch of books is Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up, the book you cannot get through without pinching yourself and thinking, can this be true? Other books worth reading on the same topic include Easy Money by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman and Going Infinite, the book about Sam Bankman-Fried by Michael Lewis, which has been criticized for being too soft on the subject. It is, however, a fantastic read.
7. Claire Hughes Johnson: Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building
I’m hesitant to mention this particular book on this list, even though it is qualified to be on it.
Based on my recommendation, I can already hear someone downloading this, listening to the hard-core processes in the book, and complaining that it is not a very entertaining reading or listening experience.
Scaling People is the best book on how to recruit people, develop them, build teams, and turn them into winning teams. It is an invaluable manual for working managers and HR professionals.
Adding gravitas to the book is Hughes Johnson’s work history, first ten years at Google, then scaling up Stripe, growing the team from 160 to over 7000.
Hughes Johnson is a big believer in making invisible best practices visible and tangible; he describes processes, shares documents, and talks about the best KPIs, all driven by a belief that you can do everything better than how it is customarily done.
8. Adam Grant: Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
You should not pick up Adam Grant’s book if you want to relax. Like all of Grant’s previous books, it is filled to the brim with ideas and research findings that will keep you awake at night.
This professor of Organizational Psychology at Wharton and a regular on the business seminar circuit writes about uncovering hidden potential this time. The focus is on developing yourself and your team.
Grant’s book is not for you if you want easy, comfortable solutions and would rather stay in your comfort zone. It takes a lot of effort to improve, and you need to get used to being uncomfortable. As he bluntly puts it, you need to become a creature of discomfort. It also requires a lot from the company committed to it.
The company’s job is to create a system that provides opportunities for all. For employees, it requires grit and tenacity that you don’t give up as soon as the going gets tough.
9. Mustafa Suleyman & Michael Bhaskar: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma
Of all the AI books I read, this is the one that ended up in the top ten. Mustafa Suleyman, the founder of Deepmind, probably knows what he is talking about. And because he focuses on the things at hand right now instead of dark visions or miracle cures. What to do with copyright issues? How do we best regulate AI? What should we, your company and you, do right now?
10. James B. Stewart & Rachel Abrams: Unscripted: The Epic Battle for an Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy
This is a deeply disturbing tale of what happens when family company members lose it and start to fight for power in earnest. Summer Redstone was the majority owner of Viacom and CBS. He was also an asshole, used to getting what he wanted. But when his body and mind started failing, and when he succumbed to opportunistic gold-diggers, the whole thing started to crumble. A reminder that there are inherent risks in companies that have 25 years for a quarter, especially if all the power is with a single tyrant.
That’s it, that’s the Best Business Books of 2023 list. I made the selection after reading, once again, 300 books. Yes, that’s too performance-oriented for my tastes, too, and I would not recommend it. No, I would not call it healthy or sane, but hey, I did it once again.
Several excellent business books did not make the list by the slightest of margins.
David Noble and Carol Kaufmann’s Real-Time Leadership is the best book on leadership in our times; it helps you succeed in an uncertain business environment. Dan Thurmon’s Positive Chaos: Transform Crisis into Clarity and Advantage is a manifesto for our times of permacrisis. This book encourages you to act despite how hopeless the world appears. Rich Howarth’s Strategic is undoubtedly the best strategy book of the year, but the writing could be more precise, and the author’s voice on the audiobook does it no favors; please read a physical copy and save your ears and nerves. Oscar Munoz might be an intolerable narcissist, but his story, Turnaround Time: United an Airlne and its Employees, reminds us of the importance of listening to people on the front. Another great autobiography is IBM’s ex-CEO Ginni Rommetty’s Good Power.
And, as usual, the most personally engaging, thought-provoking, and exciting books did not fit into the business book category. Still, they took a more comprehensive look at society as a whole. Here are my favorite non-fiction books:
Jonathan Elg: King: A Life is a brilliant, inspiring, and sometimes depressing biography of reverend Martin Luther King.
Brian Merhant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellions Against Big Tech should be required reading for all of us who don’t want to see most people turning into Luddites.
Greg Berman’s and Audry Fox’s Gradual is a passionate and convincing argument for incrementalism, the idea that humanity has grown and will prosper by making a long series of only modest improvements.
Ed Conway’s Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization is a bleak reminder that we still are, despite living in an increasingly digital world, highly dependent on such “analog” stuff as sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium, all extracted with a high cost to the environment, and often also to local communities.
Jeff Googell’s The Heat Will Kill You First is a brutal but realistic appraisal of what our world will be shortly, if and when we won’t or can’t stop global warming before it’s too late.
I’m ending the list with a single recommendation for great new fiction. Unlike all the other new books on the list published in 2023, Gabrielle Zevin’s wonderful Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow came out early; I somehow missed it in November 2022. It is a book about friendship, love, work, and how all of these things get tangled together in a life where too much is left unsaid. It is, by far, the best book I read all year.
