Forbes: CEOs Pick The Most Influential Business Books

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As part of our coverage of the most influential business books of the last two decades, we polled our CEO network. The CEO Network is a private area of the Forbes.com Web site reserved for C-level executives. (Send an e-mail to ceoinvite@forbes.net to request membership and receive an invitation code. You will be asked to prove your status as a C-level executive in order to join. Click here for more information.) The response was overwhelming: Within days we received more than 1,000 e-mails nominating more than 100 books.

Despite a few transparent attempts to rig the voting, the CEO picks were not so different from our experts' votes. (Click here to see the experts' picks.) They selected some of the same books, albeit in a slightly different order.

Despite our instructions, many CEOs thought outside the box, nominating Sun Tzu's The Art of War, The Bible and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. These books may contain excellent advice for managers, but Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957, and Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War before Christ, when much of the Bible was written as well. Nice ideas, but the box rules.

1. Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap And Others Don't by Jim Collins
   
   
   (leadership, management / leadership, business books, management)
   
   "Among books that do qualify, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap--and Others Don't, by James C. Collins tops the list. "Hands down, the most insightful business book I have ever read," one reader declared. The Collins book scored well among our panel of experts, too, but not nearly as high as Collins' earlier Built to Last. Built to Last was ranked third by the CEOs. "
   
   


2. The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
   
   
   (business books, health, motivational, self-help, success)
   
   "The CEO Network also favored Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, though it's not clear if the book made them highly effective or if they were highly effective even before reading it. One reader praised the book for saying "plainly and concisely what people need to be effective...Habits 4, 5, and 6 have been the hallmark of my management career."
   
   


3. Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies by Jerry I. Porras
   
   
   (biography, business books, economics, leadership, management / leadership, management)
   
   


4. Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
   
   
   (management, management / leadership, business books)
   
   "Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore, ranked No. 7 by our experts, was the fourth choice of our readers. It makes the case that high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically inclined customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm and sell them mainstream buyers.
   
   Said one reader: "Those that followed Moore's pragmatic advice made a lot of money in the tech boom. Those that did not lost a lot of money when the bubble burst."
   
   


5. In Search Of Excellence by Robert H. Waterman
   
   
   (management, management / leadership, business books)
   
   "Finally, the CEOs gave a nod to the book our panel named as most influential by a wide margin, In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert H. Waterman (Harper & Row 1982). Readers hailed the book as influential, though several claimed its advice did not hold up over the years."
   
   


Source:
http://www.forbes.com

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