The Curmudgeonly Professor's Business and Economics Blog

For Help In Deciding which Business Books to Read, see Business Week's List of the Best Business Books of 2008

One of my most-looked-forward-to lists each year is the annual list presenting Business Week's take on their choice of the best business books of the year.  Hardy Green reviews this list in the December 4 2008 issue of Business Week. See the entire list and comments on the books here.

Hardy's choice as one of the best books of the year is Charles R. Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, which explains the meltdown in less than 200 pages, surely a model for laconic writing other authors could profitably follow.  Books about Warren Buffet, Goldman Sachs, I. G. Farben, why people are predictably irrational, fragmented ownership, Procter and Gamble, energy and climate change, and factory girls in China round out most of the rest of the books.

One of my goals in this blog is to foster business book reading and discussion.  So take a look at the list on the link above, pick a book and buy it at your bookstore or on Amazon.com.  And don't tell me you don't have any time to read.  Some of the busiest and most important executives, business leaders, and government leaders are among the most avid readers.  So get with it.  Books will unclog your pores, help you get rid of old and shopworn ideas, and give you a leg up on charting your future.  Let me know what you read and how you liked it.

Hardy Green of Business Week Reviews Covert and Sattersten's New Book Titled "the 100 Best Business Books of All Time"

The Curmudgeonly Professor has long advocated reading business books for anyone who seriously intends to learn anything about how businesses operate in the real world.  The more business books one reads, the more one can take a clinical approach to seeing what worked, what didn't work, where blind following resulted in disasters, and where innovations spelled success.  Hardy Green of Business Week has reviewed a new compilation of business books by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten titled The 100 Best Business Books of All Time:  What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You (Portfolio, 2009).   You can read the review here.

According to Green, management books are emphasized, while biography, business narratives, and "big ideas" are downplayed.  Many "classics" such as Barbarians at the Gate, dated but still perhaps the most significant accounting of a leveraged buyout, and which was always a staple in my MBA readings course.  Naturally, ten people may have ten different ideas about any given book, but the Curmudgeonly Professor has always been leery of "Business Books Lite" although they may sell millions of copies and lay claim to the inspiration that guided some entrepreneur from rags to riches.

Green offers a comparison between Hardy's list and many of the books that business readers are reading now.  Another egregious omission from their book was Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker.  For instance.  But lists of business books are always an object of fascination to those who are strong supporters of the value of reading business books.

Congratulations to BYU for Ranking 7th in Business Week's List of 50 Best Undergraduate Business Programs

Congratulations to the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, from which I retired eight years ago for being ranked Number 7 in the top 50 undergraduate business schools in the country.  BYU finds itself in pretty elite company, with Michigan (my alma mater, though from arts and sciences, not business) at Number 6, then Emory at 5, Cornell at 4, Notre Dame at 3, Virginia at 2, and Penn (Wharton) at Number 1.  BYU is followed on the upward scale by NYU at 8, MIT at 9, and U of Texas at 10.  For a video of the top 50 schools, go here.

BYU was cited for its emphasis on training future ethical business leaders, a goal not lost in today's troubled ethical environment.  BYU was listed as having 1,616 undergrad students with an annual cost of attending at $3840 compared with, say, 246 total business undergrads at MIT at an annual cost of $34, 986.ll

Business Week reports on Amazon's Amazing Fourth Quarter

Amazon.com has become perhaps my favorite company, despite two times when I was really, really ticked at them.  The first time was when I ordered a download for twenty bucks and discovered as soon as I ordered it that I could have gotten it free from another source.  No amount of whining would get my twenty bucks back.  The second time was when Amazon lowered the price of my Sony Alpha 350 camera by 100 bucks just a few days after I got mine.  Again, no luck.  Had that been any price-matching retailer, I would have got my 100 bucks back.  

But while I still think Amazon owes me $120, the benefits of Amazon still outweigh these two issues.  I started ordering books from Amazon as soon as they opened an online book store.  As I recall, they struggled for years with big deficits each year before they imaginatively began expanding and creatively adding multiple lines of products to their inventory.  

Heather Green reports in Business Week's internet site of January 30 2009 that Amazon has "crushed the Street's expectations by snaring customers and snapping up market share as traditional merchants foundered."  Now Amazon will soon announce the next edition of the Kindle, the electronic book reader.  You can read the Business Week article here.  Amazon provides one more example of how innovation and moving out of old ruts and established ways of doing things are critical in the annals of changing and emerging business history.