Steven Forth had read by 2003 many  books, and he sent a list to me  . He reads more than me and on a wider plain. I picked out the non technical ones we had both read and listed them below. The books are listed alphabetically by author. As they say , to write well, one must read.

A
Aaker, David A., Building Strong Brands
Aaker, David A., Managing Brand Equity

B
Buffett, Warren E. and Lawrence A. Cunningham, The Essays of Warren Buffett
Burrough, Bryan, Barbarians at the Gate

C
Castonata, Carlos.
Christensen, Clayton, Innovator’s Dilemma
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim
Covey, Stephen R., The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, Flow

D
Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment Drucker, Peter Ferdinand, Managing for Results
“. The Brothers Karamazhov
Drucker, Peter Ferdinand, Managing in a Time of Great Change
Drucker, Peter F., The Effective Executive
Drucker, Peter F., The End of Economic Man
Drucker, Peter Ferdinand, The Practice of Management

E

F
Faulkner, William, Go Down Moses (especially “The Bear”)
Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury
Forster, Edward Morgan, A Passage to India

G
Goldratt, Eliyahu M., The Goal
Grove, Andrew S., Only the Paranoid Survive

H
Hemmingway, Ernest, For Whom The Bell Tolls
Hemingway, Ernest, The Old Man and the Sea
Hesse, Hermann, Siddhartha
Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables

J
K
Kidder, Tracy, The Soul of a New Machine
Kushner, Rabbi Harold S., When Bad Things Happen to Good People

L
Lee, Harper, To Kill A Mockingbird
Lewis, Michael, The New New Thing

M
Machiavelli, Niccolo, et. al., The Prince
Manchester, William, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory
McNamara, Robert S., In Retrospect
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick
Michener, James A., Centennial
Michener, James A., The Novel
Michener, James A., The Source
Michener, James A., The World is My Home
Miller, Merle, Plain Speaking

N
Nietzche, Friedrich (Editor) and Walter Kaufmann (Translator), The Portable Nietzsche

P
Peters, Thomas, et. al., In Search of Excellence
Pirsig, Robert M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Porter, Michael E., Competitive Strategy

R
Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged
Rand, Ayn, The Fountainhead
Remarque, Erich Maria, All Quiet On the Western Front

S
Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Stanley, Thomas and William Danko, The Millionaire Next Door
Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath
Stone, Irving, The Agony and the Ecstasy
Stone, Irving, The Origin

T
Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace
Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Twain, Mark, Tom Sawyer

U

V Vonnegut, Kurt.

W
Walsh, Bill, Building a Champion
Walton, Sam, Made in America
Wolfe, Tom, The Bonfire of the Vanities
Wolfe, Tom, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Wolfe, Tom, The Right Stuff
Wooden, John R., They Call Me Coach

Y

Z
Zinsser, William Knowlton, On Writing Well

Alliance Advantage. Yves L Doz and Gary Hamel. ISBN 0875846165. 1998. Hamel wrote Competing for the Future. His easy writing style is evident in this more scholarly and researched book on what it takes to have successful alliances. Their study on when in a companies growth certain types of alliances are more strategically important is tremendously important for companies who look to OEM and distribution deals to extend their market reach. A keeper that you will refer to time and again, make this a library addition. I really enjoyed their in depth analysis of major deals that went well and not so well.

Scenarios, The Art of Strategic Conversation. Kees Van Der Heijden. ISBN 0471966398. March 2002. How do companies these days deal with turbulence and change? Kees helps you meet the challenge of external change through linking the scenario thinking (what may happen) with your Business Idea (Your distinctive competence/unfair advantage). Although a dense read, it is all here for the in depth student of strategic thinking. Easily the best guidebook I have read on this subject. However, it is not a weekend read.

Linked. ALbert-Lazlo Barabasi. ISBN 045228439. May 2003.
The author, with a very readable style, has shown the network similarities of cocktail parties, Al Quaida, E Coli, The World Wide Web, The North American power grid, Asian banking, Google and Microsoft, among many many others. Buy it, read it and reread it if you want to understand just what is going on in the world we live in, and why the Internet “network” has so much more to teach us than the content. The next new thing just might be on the pages of this easy reading, hard hitting book

.