Famous People's Book Pick: Fast Company: Best Business Books of 2006

Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

"The best companies are driven by a higher calling than profit. That's what motivates employees, customers, and shareholders. Mourkogiannis considers how companies develop a purpose and how they need to tend to it as they evolve."

The Immortal Game

"In this engaging, brisk historical survey, Shenk finds the game of chess in the palaces, artists' salons, and scientists' laboratories of the last 1,500 years. Interspersed with chess' influence on strategy, science, and the arts is a dynamic retelling of a famous 19th century game that ushered in chess' modern era."

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business

"Meyer, the impresario behind some of New York's most popular restaurants, shares his philosophy of leadership and customer service through hospitality. Along the way, he also creates a telling portrait of an entrepreneur in one of the riskiest businesses on Earth."

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

"Learn the roots of 2006's most-bandied about -- and misused -- buzzword with Anderson's fleshed-out manifesto that the Internet's reach will cause niche markets to play a greater role economically and culturally."

The New American Workplace

"In 1973, Work in America set the agenda for a generation of conversation about how we feel about work. With its sequel 33 years later, the two academics consider how far we've come -- and how far we still have to go in light of today's global economy being roiled by technological change."

Alpha Male Syndrome

"Alpha execs can be the kind of competitive visionaries needed to thrive in a cut-throat economy -- if they don't slash the throat of their colleagues and underlings first. Husband-and-wife consultants Ludeman and Erlandson outline four types of alphas and explore how to remove Achilles heel while still maintaining their superpowers."

Management by Baseball

"America's pastime is an apt metaphor for the skills required of today's leaders -- processing a mountain of data quickly in a rapidly changing environment, anticipating and preparing for what's going to happen in a given situation, and constantly reinventing yourself. You can learn a lot more from baseball than who's on first."

The Change Function : Why Some Technologies Take Off and Others Crash and Burn

"Coburn, a former technology consultant who's now an investor, argues that technologies succeed or fail based on how well they convince people that the pain of learning something new is less than the pain of staying with the status quo. This challenges the conventional wisdom that technologies fail because they were priced too high or customers didn't appreciate all of their whiz-bang features."

Apex Hides the Hurt

"A nameless branding consultant rides into town to settle a naming dispute and in the process has to come to terms with his own identity and unexamined life. This fast and sharp novel is a masterpiece of symbolism and irony, and it'll leave you pondering your own questions of self."

Who Moved My BlackBerry?

"A Sammy Glick for the CrackBerry era, Martin Lukes' hilarious story of striving and scheming unfolds through a series of email responses. Why are the Aussies and the Brits so good at skewering corporate nonsense?"

Company

"Barry, an Australian novelist who has developed a cult following poking fun at American workplace mores, returns with another cutting satire in which the protagonist, a new hire at a mysterious company, uncovers that the employees are part of a business experiment in which the employees think their company produces one thing but it secretly produces something else."

The Wal-Mart Effect

"Fishman, a Fast Company senior writer, adapted his December 2003 cover story, The Wal-Mart You Don't Know, into a fascinating, even-handed look at the world's largest retailer and how even its most simple actions, such as pricing salmon at $4.84 a pound, ripple through the global economy."