In-depth article No.6558: 5400 words | 12 minutes reading.

Note that you said:

There is a question on the Zhihu: "At what moment do you think knowledge has changed your destiny?"

Buffett once said that if he hadn't read The Smart Investor when he was 19 years old, the whole life track would be completely different.

Ma Yun also said: "After losing the first college entrance examination, I worked as a temporary worker. I bought the book Life by Lu Yao at Yiwu Railway Station. I saw that people took the exam without going to college once, but I stepped on a tricycle without going to college. I decided to take the exam the next year. It was not until the third year that I finally got in. I am especially grateful to Lu Yao. "

Lei Jun also thinks: "A book and a person have changed my life, which made me want to build a world-class company when I was a freshman." This book is called Fire in Silicon Valley.

In addition to these bosses, there are many mountain children who change their fate by knowledge. The more people have dreams, the more they regard reading as a major event in life.

But there are tens of thousands of new books published every year, and countless books have been published in the past. How can I find a book worth reading?

According to past experience, Notebook Man selected 23 business books for your reference.

I. Organization and management

1. Efficient manager

Peter drucker is the pioneer of management discipline and is known as "the father of modern management".

Based on years of observation, Drucker put forward that "not only senior managers are managers, but every knowledge worker is actually a manager, even if he has no so-called authority, as long as he can make outstanding contributions to the organization."

This book is called an essential introductory book for junior managers, which can help you better understand Drucker's basic system of management cognition.

Drucker believes that an effective manager generally has the following six characteristics:

Attach importance to goals and performance; Just do the right thing.

Do only one thing at a time, only the important things.

As a knowledge worker, he knows what he can contribute.

When selecting top managers, he pays attention to excellent performance and integrity.

He knows the importance of improving communication; He collects the information he needs selectively.

He only makes effective decisions.

Step 2: Dry method

The book Ganfa fully explains the views and practices of kazuo inamori, a Japanese business sage. Literally speaking, dry method seems to be a way to tell how to work effectively. But in fact, this book focuses on the "labor view" and "work view" in the outlook on life, which is of great and profound practical significance in the impetuous moment.

Ganfa is not only a summary and sharing of Mr. kazuo inamori's 70-year work experience, but also a correct concept that has been proved by many successful enterprises. In particular, it is not a chicken soup preaching that is simply misunderstood as "as long as you work hard, you will succeed in a few years", but a belief that you can't give up your responsibility for your life.

3. bystanders

The spectator is the memoir of peter drucker, the father of modern management. From the perspective of bystander, Drucker tried to reflect the face of the society at that time through the little people in the "social image" and capture and convey the unimaginable essence, charm and feelings of that generation.

The writing purpose of spectator is to describe some special people and their maverick. It can be said to be a collection of short stories, and each chapter can be independent.

Although this book is not Drucker's most important work, it is Drucker's personal favorite.

4. Article 5 Discipline

In the fifth discipline, Peter, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States? Shengji clearly put forward the management concept of "learning organization" and how to build a learning organization with super learning ability through five major disciplines, emphasizing that engaging in one discipline means becoming a lifelong learner.

The five subjects in this book are:

① Self-transcendence

Personally, self-transcendence refers to the desire to constantly surpass one's ability, as well as the enthusiasm and motivation to study hard.

② Mental model

Everyone has some fixed ideas, views and ways of thinking about the world. For example, you and Ma Yun have different mental models about the retail industry. Li Xiaolai also said that what is stupidity is that every time you take the same action and expect to achieve different results, that is stupidity.

The reason why people take the same action every time is because our mental model has not changed. Therefore, if you want to improve your behavior and improve your ability, what you really need to change is your mental model, so that you can understand and know the world in a more reasonable way.

3 * * * The same vision

From the team's point of view, * * * common vision means that everyone in the organization has a * * * common goal and can work together.

④ Team learning

It means that everyone in the team can show their mental models, communicate with each other and inspire each other, so that the team can learn and progress quickly.

⑤ Systematic thinking

Systematic thinking is the cultivation of observing the whole, which can help us deeply understand new ways of looking inward and outward. It breaks the traditional way of thinking that is one-sided, simple and single cause and effect. Think that the world is a system, which is interrelated and influential.

The fifth discipline, in a sense, is the foundation of the first four disciplines, and the level of systematic thinking also determines the final effect of the first four disciplines.

5. It means revolution

How can employees be motivated not only by wages, bonuses or other material rewards? How to build an enterprise that makes the team feel a sense of belonging? How to be what Drucker called an effective leader? These are the problems that this book is committed to solving.

Leadership is not only methods and skills, but also a recognition of values.

In this book, Fred Kaufman, Google's vice president and leadership development consultant, points out that companies that can successfully make employees, teams and corporate culture run around values and meanings will perform better than their competitors.

6. Tai Fang culture

Tai Fang has crossed the scale of10 billion in 22 years. For Tai Fang, culture is business!

Mao Zhongqun, chairman of Tai Fang, said: "I usually don't look at sales data and profit data, and I don't care much. I care about culture, strategy and research and development. The strategy is correct, the research and development is excellent, the products are good, and the sales volume and profit are natural results. "

No matter how the market environment changes, Tai Fang's business has never experienced ups and downs, effectively resisting the possibility of various risks. In 20021year, the group achieved sales revenue of15.5 billion yuan, up 29% year-on-year, up 4 1% compared with 19.

Tai Fang is an enterprise, but also a cultural phenomenon! Tai Fang's practice is how to turn the retreat culture into a classic of pragmatic business achievements.

Mao Zhongqun, chairman of Tai Fang, said: "If there is only one thing that can be preserved in Tai Fang, the only thing that can be passed on is culture!" Tai Fang culture believes that to be an enterprise is to be a man, and the key to the success of an enterprise lies in the success of being a man, that is, personality, enterprise products and products are integrated, and personality determines enterprise products and products.

Second, the strategic category.

1. Configuration

This book expounds the emergence of the concept of "positioning", analyzes the reasons why "meeting the needs" can't win users, and gives the methods to enter the user's mind to win users' choice of positioning.

Whether it is product development or marketing, this book is worth reading.

2. Category strategy

Nowadays, books, articles and speeches related to "marketing" are all talking about the necessity of establishing "brand". All you can see is "brand, brand, brand".

How to build a strong brand? Obviously, we can't just base ourselves on the brand itself. Only by thinking about categories can we build a strong brand. Brand is just an intuitive aspect of marketing, just like the tip of the iceberg on the water. Every powerful brand has a promising category, just as the main body of the iceberg is at the tip of the iceberg, and the main body of the brand is the category. The strength of a brand is inseparable from the strength of the category itself.

3. Good strategy, bad strategy

Strategy is not empty talk, just as simple as shouting slogans. Strategy determines the life and death of an enterprise and can change its fate.

Over the past ten years, a large number of books on strategy have appeared, and the concepts are rampant and chaotic. This book returns the "strategy" to the essence and analyzes the basic logic that constitutes a good strategy, namely, three core elements:

Investigation and analysis: analyze the situation, recognize the competitive advantages and situation, and understand the competitors;

Guiding principle: formulate an overall strategy to overcome obstacles;

Coherent activities: Take unified and coherent actions.

4. Lean entrepreneurship

Eric refines lean entrepreneurship into a feedback loop: idea-development-measurement-cognition-new idea. According to this model, the first step of starting a business is to turn ideas into products, and the products developed at this time are simplified prototypes. Put the least money and energy into developing products that embody core values, and don't spend too much energy on many details.

When the products with minimal functions are recognized by users, entrepreneurs need to control the situation, test the products in constant feedback and circulation, adjust and change quickly, iteratively optimize the products, tap the needs of users, and achieve explosive growth. Start-ups must find valuable knowledge at the lowest cost and in the shortest time before consuming start-up funds.

Third, economics.

1. Guns, bacteria and steel: the fate of human society

Why did Europeans conquer the new continent with guns, germs and steel, instead of African or American natives crossing the ocean to conquer Europe?

In Cajamarca, Peru, the conquerors from Spain led only 168 Spanish soldiers and captured the last emperor of the Inca Empire with 80,000 soldiers. Why did the Inca Empire still lose the war with such a huge number of people?

What determines the distribution of power and wealth in today's world?

In Diamond's view, different geographical environments affect the grain production of different ethnic groups. The improvement of grain production capacity and the growth of population density promote each other, and the production work is becoming more and more complicated. Intensive grain production has effectively promoted the complexity of society.

Therefore, the dominant nationalities in grain production will have advantages in germs, culture, political organization and technology, and then they can easily defeat the inferior nationalities in grain production. Therefore, different nationalities have different development situations and civilized roads.

The wheel of human history depicted in the book is still moving forward, but the crisis faced by modern civilized society has long gone far beyond the dilemma of conquest and conquest represented by guns, germs and steel. However, as a whole, mankind can still find the answer from the grand narrative of human history of guns, germs and steel when dealing with the threats of global climate change, infectious diseases, nuclear weapons and resource depletion.

2. Principle: Respond to the ever-changing world order

The development of nature is regular, and everything runs according to its inherent trajectory. People can know it, experience it and reform it in a certain way according to objective laws.

In this book, Rui Daglio discusses the operating rules and principles of society and the world. He studied the circular pattern and causality behind all the major changes in wealth and power in the past 500 years. He believes that there are eternal and universal laws behind these changes. By investigating many interrelated historical events, we can see the typical patterns, laws, cycles and causality of these changes, and infer the future on this basis.

The analysis and exploration of this book is based on Daglio's original debt cycle and historical cycle, revealing the eternal and universal power behind the change, thus looking forward to the future, finding out the operating principle of the world, and summing up the eternal and universal principles to properly cope with the current situation.

3. Thinking, fast and slow

Author Daniel Kahneman is a famous American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.

He thinks that our brains have two ways to make decisions: fast and slow. The commonly used unconscious "system 1" relies on emotion, memory and experience to make quick judgments. It is well informed and enables us to react quickly to the current situation. But the system 1 is also easily fooled. It adheres to the principle of "seeing is believing" and allows illusions such as aversion to loss and optimistic prejudice to guide us to make wrong choices.

Conscious "System 2" analyzes and solves problems and makes decisions by mobilizing attention. Slow, not easy to make mistakes, but lazy, often take shortcuts, and directly use the intuitive judgment result of system 1.

In order to let readers really understand the characteristics of the two protagonists, System 1 and System 2, Kahneman introduced many classic and interesting behavior experiments, pointing out when we can trust our intuition and when we can't. Instruct us how to make better choices in shopping malls, workplaces and personal lives, and how to use different skills to avoid thinking mistakes that often get us into trouble.

4. "Value"

"We are entrepreneurs and happen to be investors". Zhang Lei founded Gaoling with optimistic entrepreneur mentality, adhered to the concept of value investment, found and created value with long-term and research drive, strengthened "China's heavy position", supported the real economy and helped industrial innovation.

In the book Value, Zhang Lei not only shared his personal experience, but also shared his investment ideas and methods, his thoughts on the self-cultivation of value investors, and introduced his understanding of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial organizations, talents, education and science from the perspective of overall situation.

Fourth, the business history of China.

1. Thirty years of turmoil

2. Ten Years of Agitation

3. A hundred years of ups and downs

4. Only two thousand years.

As a recorder of the times, Wu Xiaobo consciously recorded the earth-shaking changes that have taken place in China since the beginning of China's reform and opening up in 1978, and the people and events that have had a far-reaching impact on us, thus stringing together a history of the times for each of us. The last decade is undoubtedly more spectacular and confusing.

These four books are very good-looking, even a little top-notch, just like reading novels. By understanding these histories, you will gradually generate a map in your mind, which is also very enlightening for the present.

Five, thinking decision-making course

1. deviation

Olivier Siboni, the author of this book, has been committed to improving the quality of decision-making for many years. For 25 years, he has been a decision-making consultant of McKinsey & Company. He found that many companies' business decisions and even strategic decisions were wrong.

There are many "lessons from the past", and data evidence shows that these decisions are likely to lead to failure, or even disastrous consequences, and many decision makers will still make the same mistakes. Studies in cognitive psychology have found that these decision-making mistakes are caused by cognitive bias, which will lead decision-makers to go astray and fall into the decision-making trap.

Siboni believes that a good way to avoid the cognitive bias trap is to establish an effective decision-making framework in your organization, instead of reusing the old "deviant" techniques that make managers fail again and again.

2. Influence

This book is a classic work of social psychology by Theodini. In the book, the author explains the six basic principles behind obeying others from a professional perspective: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social identity, preference, authority and scarcity.

This book is of far-reaching significance to both business people and ordinary readers. It teaches you to say "no" to practitioners and helps you become a truly influential person.

3. Golden Pagoda Principle

Barbara minto graduated from Harvard University and is an executive of McKinsey & Company.

This book introduces an efficient way to show ideas clearly. It is a practical book to train thinking and make expression logical.

The golden pyramid principle can organize scattered ideas in an orderly way and simplify them, which is suitable for all readers who need to improve their thinking, analysis and expression skills.

4. Links: New ideas of business, science and life

Link: The new thinking of business, science and life brings us a holistic, interrelated and systematic way of looking at the world, which makes us not only limit our vision to isolated units. Ubiquitous links are bridges from simple to complex, from single to diverse, from ordinary to bright.

Step 5 get out of control

Out of Control is one of the most important works in the Internet age.

This book is a "tome" about machines, systems, biology and society, revealing the "prophecy" of social evolution, especially the development of the Internet. From this book, people can get a glimpse of the present and future of SNS.

* The article is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Note Man.