Benerin
Books
Center
Excellent Books Recommended by
a Harvard MBA
Memoirs of Hadrian By
Marguerite Yourcenar , Grace Frick ( Translator)
This is a historical novel on the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who ruled
the huge empire at the apex of Roman Civilization-Romana Pax (Roman
Peace-Hadrian 76 - 138 AD) I was recommended to this book through an
article at the Harvard Business Review. In the article Franco Bernabe, the
CEO of an Italian conglomerate ENI, discusses the challenges to navigate his
company through the power struggles and crises in the past decade. He
recommends Memoirs of Hadrian as the best book about leadership. Bernabe said,
"In this book, you come to see why Hadrian was one the the greatest Roman
emperors. He did not have sophisticated training or leadership experience,
but he did have a good understanding of human nature, and he was able to draw
our the best from everybody. This is leadership." After reading
the book, I agree to Bernabe's comments and understand how the book greatly
influenced Bernabe's leadership style described in the Harvard Business Review
article. A masterpiece of literature and psychological novel, this book
gave me a great pleasure by digesting it page by page but it proved to be a
little challenge to read for a reader like me, whose English is his second
language.
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
By Peter F. Drucker
Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary
Companies
By James C. Collins, Jerry I. Porras
You can Negotiate Anything
By Herb Cohen
If you have not read this tiny book yet, please grab one for yourself. You
are guaranteed to have fun to read and to learn the best lessons on negotiation
from a bargaining expert, Herb Cohen. This classic negotiation book, first
published in 1980, vividly explains the most important negotiation principles
though many amusing negotiation scenarios, ranging from buying refrigerators to
bargaining with terrorists. After reading the book in 1994, I loved it so
much that I decided to read more negotiation books and ended up writing a
negotiation book myself. This is really a gem of the negotiation
literature.
Thinking Strategically
By
Avinash Dixit & Barry Nalebuff
The Art of Thinking
By
Vincent Ryan Ruggiero
The New Financial Capitalists By
George P. Baker, George David Smith
This book is about the history of KKR-the king of leveraged buyout (LBO)
firms-and the significant contributions of LBO firms to the advancement of the
corporate control and the "new financial capitalism" in the United
States. The co-author George Baker was my first year Harvard MBA professor
on business history. He also taught a second year MBA course called CCMO,
which was about corporation control and motivation. From this book I
refreshed my learning in the above two courses and dig out great insights on the
high finance of the United States. As an entrepreneur and company
executive myself now, I can start to appreciate LBO firms' claim of using
ownership of equity to align the interests of managers and investors, and the
claim of using debt as an effective disciplinary tool over managers.
This book is good for those who want to understand the operations of high
finance and the dynamic interaction of corporate control in the United States.
It will help a lot to read this book if readers understand basic finance or
accounting concepts.
A
Random Walk Down Wall Street By Burton G. Malkiel
Many of my Harvard MBA classmates agreed that this is one of the best
introductory books for those who really want to learn investment and finance but
are tired of those over-simplified or get-you-extremely-rich-surely-and-quickly
types of nonsense. I am still amazed by the lucid writing and explanations
on many finance topics we studied at Harvard. But, just like all the other
investment books, Random Walk exhibits a distinctive point of view on
investment, which is called the "random walk theory". Although
it is arguable that this theory is outdated and lost its attractions among many
financial professionals, I insist that you should definitely study it-from an
investor's point of view rather than from a financial professional's point of
view. Whether becoming the theory's disciples or not, millions of readers
have benefited from the author's wisdom and teaching in the past 20 years.
And many probably have avoided pitfalls and huge commissions paid to those
"financial professionals" who strongly discredit this book.
The New Strategic Selling
By
Stephen E. Heiman
Although there is no doubt that Harvard Business School is a top-notch business
school, surprisingly it did not give me much training on selling. For me,
this book plays the missing link role to connect me from strategy and marketing
to the business battlefront-selling. It opened my eyes on a thoughtful
framework on analyzing selling situations and on "covering" completely
the various Selling Influences. It is very different from other millions
of other sales training books, which mostly are touting about all sorts of
tactics or tricks to ensure you a top star salesman. The New Strategic Selling
is for those who want to have a solid pre-selling preparation or who are going
to manage a sales team. It is for the generals or for those soldiers with
expectation to become generals someday.
Product Management
A
Great Place to Find Great Books... 