The Best Productivity & Effectiveness Books

The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List

2008 Edition: Revised and Updated

Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

About This Category:

The Productivity & Effectiveness category is designed to help you increase the amount of value you create while decreasing the time and effort necessary to deliver results. These books will teach you:

How to set priorities.
How to manage your responsibilities.
How to manage complex projects.

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker

When you’re in charge of a business, the most important job you have is not simply to ensure that “things get done” – it’s to ensure the right things get done, at the right time, and in the right way.

In The Effective Executive, you’ll learn that the role of leadership in every organization is to set clear priorities, focus the strengths of the people on those priorities, and make tough choices about what to do and what not to do in the face of uncertainty.

Drucker argues that every executive should have a standard, core set of personal skills: effective time management, clear communication, and the ability to make solid decisions based on the data available. These aren’t inborn abilities; they can only be developed through study and experience, and leaders should ensure that these skills are developed in subordinates through training and experience.

Each point is illustrated with several historical examples, so you'll really understand why each idea is important and how it looks in the real world.

(You’ll see two more books by Drucker in the Personal MBA Reading List for a reason: they really are all they’re cracked up to be. Drucker's influence on the business world is so profound that you can find seeds of almost every other book on this list in material he wrote decades ago.)

Getting Things Done by David Allen

You probably have a lot to do right now. How do you keep track of all of your responsibilities and commitments without going insane? Getting Things Done is a complete system of work habits that will allow you to capture, organize, and track everything that’s on your mind, resulting in a clear, calm view of the next actions needed to keep your projects moving.

Getting Things Done is a distillation of David Allen's decades of experience working with busy corporate executives. Instead of starting with high-level principles, GTD begins with "collecting" everything on your mind, then organizing your thoughts in a system designed to help you focus on what's most important at any given moment.

In this book, you'll learn how to set up a productive workspace, capture random thoughts and ideas, maintain a useful filing system, and track your progress towards your goals.

Getting Things Done is a system of habits, and as such, it takes a while to fully understand and adopt. Don't be discouraged: if you want to take your personal productivity to the next level, Getting Things Done is the best place to start.

Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst

Information overload is stressful and exhausting. If your e-mail inbox is overflowing, your desktop is full of random documents, and using your computer is a daily exercise in stress and frustration, you need to read Bit Literacy.

There's a reason most of us have issues with using technology effectively: we've learned to use our computers in an ad-hoc way, instead of thinking about the longer-term implications of our default digital organization strategy. In this book, Mark Hurst shows you how to improve your life by adopting a few simple practices to manage your digital information.

The core premise of Bit Literacy is that digital information is “psychologically heavy” – when you see that your inbox has 3000 messages in it or you notice that your desktop is out of control, it weighs you down in a very real way. The solution, according to Hurst, is to “let the bits go” by using a few simple and intuitive systems to organize your data. When your bits are finally under control, you'll literally feel the difference.

A great deal of the information contained in Bit Literacy pertains to e-mail, since it's the most commonly overused/misused tool. After you adopt Hurst's methods, you'll notice two things: (1) you'll only see information when you need to act on it, and (2) you'll be able to find your digital information immediately when you need it.

Hurst's opinionated, "do-it-this-way" approach is simple and straightforward, which means you're more likely to actually use and stick with his solutions. Even advanced computer users will pick up something useful from this book.

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

Creating something new and useful is one of the surest and best ways to succeed in business, but "the muse" is notoriously fickle. But does it have to be?

Twyla Tharp is one of the most respected and influential choreographers of our time, and she has a great deal to say about creativity. In The Creative Habit, you will learn how to actively harness your creativity through a combination of preparation, routine, and practice.

The principles taught in this book are straightforward and very practical. You will learn how to prepare for creativity through the use of rituals, constraints, structure, doodling, research, and improvisation - all illustrated with personal stories and examples from Tharp's 35+ years of professional dance experience.

Consistent, sustained creativity takes a great deal of effort, but you don't have to wait for the muse - if you're willing to learn what Tharp has to teach in The Creative Habit, your persistence and dedication will make the muse come to you.

(Link: if you're interested, here's a great example of Twyla's work: Moving Out, a musical based on the music of singer-songwriter Billy Joel.)

The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz

Don't judge a book by its cover: this is not a flowery, froofy self-help book. The Path of Least Resistance will completely change the way you think about goals and planning.

The author's background is, of all things, music composition. While studying the creative process to as a way to help himself create better music, Fritz discovered that there aren't just similarities between the creative process used by artists and the process businesspeople use to create results: it's the exact same process. From a certain perspective, every creative and productive person is simply "making it up as they go along," regardless of their field of work or study.

"Structural tension" is a key element in many complex systems in the world, including the systems you're surrounded by when you're trying to work. If you're trying to accomplish something important and you're having trouble making progress, you should examine the structure underlying your actions. Trying to achieve better results without changing the underlying structure is like trying to ski uphill - you can try, but it's not going to work all that well.

Ultimately, The Path of Least Resistance will teach you how to imagine (in vivid detail) what you want to create, establish a structure that will pull you towards your goal, and maintain the momentum generated by your early efforts until you've successfully created what you desire. This book will help you in every aspect of your life and work. After all, isn't creating something of value what business is fundamentally about?

(Note: special thanks to Phillip Eby for recommending this book.)

The Simplicity Survival Handbook by Bill Jensen

It’s remarkably rare to find a book in which the author tells you on the first page not to read the whole book. Bill Jensen, however, believes in the virtue of ruthless simplicity, and his advice is to focus squarely on the few subjects in this book that will help you most RIGHT NOW.

The Simplicity Survival Handbook teaches you how to complete critical tasks in a modern business organization with a minimum of time, energy, and politics. Jensen shows no mercy in finding ways to circumvent or eliminate everything in your working life that gets in the way of getting the most important things done. Along the way, you’ll learn how to interact with peers and your managers, communicate effectively, present to senior management, and deal with the onslaught of change and information common in modern organizations.

Backed by years of organizational research and practical experience, The Simplicity Survival Handbook will help you manage day-to-day life in a working world where “MoreBetterFaster” is the rule.

Cut to the Chase by Stuart Levine

The best way to get things done is to get to the point: communicate as clearly, simply, and effectively as possible, and avoid unimportant activities that suck up time but deliver no value. Cut to the Chase is a short but detailed book about how to use and protect your two most valuable assets: your time and energy.

Stuart Levine’s experience as a CEO lead him to conclude that a lot of time is wasted at work, and the biggest culprit is ineffective communication and unclear priorities. Levine sets a good example by respecting your time reading this book. Each of his 100 principles is detailed in no more than two pages, using crystal-clear language and examples.

Your time is enormously valuable, and every day you're teaching others how to use your time, whether you realize it or not. Using simple tactics like "I got it - let's move on", having crystal-clear objectives before you start working, and setting meetings for 10 minutes instead of an hour can save you precious minutes, and those minutes add up to hours over the course of a standard workday.

You'll want to keep Cut to the Chase handy by your desk for quick ideas and inspiration - the habits Levine recommends aren't always easy to adopt, but practice eventually makes perfect.

The Unwritten Laws of Business by W.J. King

This illuminating little book has been the subject of a great deal of controversy.

Originally published in 1944 as The Unwritten Rules of Engineering, this book by W.J. King was an underground college textbook best-seller until much of its content was co-opted by Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson, who published a short booklet called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management. The booklet became a minor sensation, receiving accolades from everyone from Jack Welch to Warren Buffett, until the copycatting was discovered, leading to a very public scandal and a dark smudge on Swanson's reputation.

Swanson, to his credit, picked a very good book to plagiarize: The Unwritten Laws of Business is a short, no-nonsense primer on how to work effectively in a modern company.

A collection of short maxims and meditations, this book speaks with the air of authority and hard-won experience. Like a commercial Confucius, King has a knack for presenting the realities of working in a complex organization clearly and simply.

Covering everything from estimating project schedules to confirming commitments, The Unwritten Laws of Business is a good book to keep handy by your desk if you work for a company - you'll consult it often.

Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun

Project management is a core business skill that every successful business professional must learn. Unfortunately, most people learn it by managing projects without training or support, relying on mistakes and feedback to improve their skills. Making Things Happen is full of practical advice and real-world examples about how to lead projects successfully from conception to completion, without having to "learn it the hard way".

Scott Berkun, formerly a project manager for Microsoft, has a knack for skipping the complicated jargon and convoluted methodologies that characterize most project management books. Instead, he breaks complex subjects down to the critical essentials and provides a copious amount of real-world examples, which makes this book very approachable and easy to understand.

Unlike the vast majority of project management texts, Making Things Happen isn't designed to lead you towards PMI certification: it's designed to give you perspective and practical information that would take years to learn via the "school of hard knocks."

The first version of this book, The Art of Project Management, was focused on software and technology development professionals. Making Things Happen is a revised edition that makes Burkun's advice more applicable to all project managers, regardless of industry. The leadership and management lessons presented in this book are universal to all projects, making this revised edition a must-read.

Results Without Authority by Tom Kendrick

If you're responsible for leading a project in a modern company, there's a 99.9% probability that at least one of the members of the team doesn't report to you. Results Without Authority will teach you how to lead a project team effectively via influence and clear communication.

Tom Kendrick is a program manager at Hewlett-Packard, and has a great deal of experience in leading large, complex project teams. In Results Without Authority, you'll learn about project control, project management processes, building effective relationships, planning, and monitoring progress.

The straightforward structure of this book makes it easy to quickly find sections that are relevant to your current projects. Examples are used liberally to illustrate key concepts and practices.

Appendix A contains a list of common project management questions, and alone is well worth the price of the book. If you're responsible for leading a project, large or small, read Results Without Authority.