The 2009 edition of the Personal MBA reading list is live! Check out the updates to the manifesto, as well as the recommended reading list.
Major Changes
- Each book now has its own summary page, making browsing significantly easier.
- The design of the list has been updated to improve readability and navigation.
- The “Business History” and “Business Reference” sections of the list have been eliminated due to lack of use. As a result, this edition is a net reduction in recommended books, even with the new additions this year.
New Books
This edition features 15 new books. They are…
- The Power of Less by Leo Babauta
- Brain Rules by John Medina
- The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
- Driven by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
- Smart Choices by John S. Hammond et al
- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
- The Knack by Norm Brodsky & Bo Burlingham
- Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
- Total Leadership by Stewart Friedman
- Tribes by Seth Godin
- Accounting Made Simple by Mike Piper
- Fail-Safe Investing by Harry Browne
- Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina
- Re-Create Your Life by Morty Lefkoe
- Changing for Good by James O. Prochaska et al
Future Updates
This list of recommendations has developed a great deal over the past four years. As a result, we’re rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns when it comes to huge annual updates. Future changes to the list will happen incrementally, with a maximum cap of 99 recommended resources. (The list is currently at 94 recommended books.) I expect that a few books will be added over time, and books will be removed if they go out of print. Otherwise, I expect this incarnation of the list to be stable.
New Feature: Business Book Recommender
The PMBA Business Book Recommender is a beta feature designed to help identify the best book for you, based on your current question or interest. My goal for this page is to help you find a great business book in 30 seconds or less.
To develop this great new feature, I need your help! Instead of answering questions I think people will ask, I want to focus on answering the questions you actually have. If you’d like to help me build the PMBA Business Book Recommender, all you need to do is contact me with your question, and I’ll add the response to the recommender.
Happy reading!
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Josh, It’s a great update!
The changes in the manifesto make your value proposition very clear.
I really like the way you reorganized the list into new categories based on function. It’s going to look great on your sidebar once that’s updated, too.
The individual pages are helpful, too. I hope you will be adding forward and backward buttons on them, so you can go down the summaries without having to constantly go back to the overall list.
Personally, I’m excited to see Thinking in Systems on your list and will be adding to the discussion in the community once you add the new book threads. I just finished reading it, loved it, and will be talking about it on my blog, too.
I just realized my comment was full of more for you to do, sorry about that. I’m glad you launched the new list and will be taking a look at the new additions.
Thanks, Beth! Discussion topics for each the new books have been added to the Community. More updates to come!
Josh,
Great work with the site updates. I look forward to using the recommended book tool.
Steve Pavlina and Leo Babauta well deserve to be included amongst the greats of development writers. They best represent a “new breed” of self-help / personal-development and add depth to the PMBA book list.
Kind Regards, Brian
Congratulations for this great update Josh !
I will wait to finish my current crazy project before reading the new books, but they seems really interesting !
I already read Steve Pavlina’s book and it’s a must have, very good choice. But grrr, you didn’t include the Emyth yet, I think I will never succeed to convince you
.
Thanks Josh for this new release !
A lot more to read !!
For those who would be interested in reading in French, you will find the list at http://www.mybusinesseducation.fr with the translation and an equivalent if available:
http://www.mybusinesseducation.fr/content/les-livres
Maybe you’ve already got this somewhere and I just haven’t found it yet but I was wondering what you thought about keeping the history of the reading list somewhere on the site. I think it would be interesting to see how the list changes over time. And if there were books on the list we had intended to read but are no longer on the current list it would give us a way to find those older books.
Lots to read here. Better get started! Wish there where more audiobooks (in the car 60 minutes a day – prime “reading” time) but they’ll get there eventually! Wonder if there are many for the Kindle…
After thinking about Greg’s post above and that I had the same thought, I created a spreadsheet and posted the following to the forum at pbmacommunity – thought others might be interested also.
Great to see this updated list, but a bit frustrating since I had barely gotten around to resolving where I was on the original list with last year’s update!
Since I wanted to see where I was and what was added/deleted, I created a spreadsheet that has all of the books from the beginning with columns for the categories (original, 2008, 2009) with a number pre-pended. This allows me to sort the list by any of the versions and categories. I also color coded the titles & categories. The book title is the color for the most recent list it is on.
I created a google spreadsheet from my own sheet (after removing some of my own tracking columns), so if anyone is interested in this list, they should be able to open this URL – http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=prSZk37QzkpYp9sV7yeM6Lw – and then export or copy their own version.