Recommended Reading List : Business

In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women's progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential. Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and is ranked on Fortune's list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business and as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice.

The best-selling author of Blink identifies the qualities of successful people, posing theories about the cultural, family, and idiosyncratic factors that shape high achievers, in a resource that covers such topics as the secrets of software billionaires, why certain cultures are associated with better academic performance, and why the Beatles earned their fame.

Competitive Advantage introduces a tool that may be used to diagnose and enhance competitive advantage: the value chain. Value-chain analysis allows the manager to separate the underlying activities a firm performs in designing, producing, marketing, and distributing its product or service. It is these activities from which competitive advantage ultimately stems. By showing how all the firm's activities can be examined in this integrated way, Porter provides a practical perspective on competitive strategy.

A respected international economic advisor and the director of The Earth Institute shares a wide-spectrum theory about how to enable economic success throughout the world, identifying the different categories into which various nations fall in today's economy while posing solutions to top political, environmental, and social problems that contribute to poverty.

Ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do." Behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes.

The World Is Flat is Thomas L. Friedman's account of the great changes taking place in our time, as lightning-swift advances in technology and communications put people all over the globe in touch as never before - creating an explosion of wealth in India and China, and challenging the rest of us to run even faster just to stay in place.