Business

Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, first published in 1997, introduced a concept that has become one of the most influential ideas in business strategy: disruptive innovation. The argument is deceptively simple. Successful companies, through rational decision-making and careful attention to their best customers, consistently fail to adopt technologies or products that initially appear inferior but…

Built to Last emerged from a six-year research project at Stanford Business School in which Jim Collins and Jerry Porras compared eighteen “visionary” companies — firms like 3M, Boeing, Disney, HP, and Merck — with a matched set of less successful counterparts, looking for what distinguished the long-lasting winners. Their findings, published in 1994, shaped…

Ed Catmull spent a good part of his twenties trying to solve a problem that most people thought was impossible: making a computer-animated feature film. Not a short. Not a demo reel. A full movie, ninety minutes or more, rendered entirely by machine. He started working on the idea around 1974, when computer animation existed…

Geoffrey A. Moore first published Crossing the Chasm in 1991, and it promptly did something unusual for a business book: it spread entirely by word of mouth among the people it described. Engineers handed it to managers. VCs pressed it on founders. By the time Moore released his third revised edition in 2014, over a…

L. David Marquet spent his Navy career ascending through the ranks of nuclear submarine command. He studied the USS Olympia for a year, committed its systems and crew to memory, and prepared to take the helm. Two weeks before his scheduled command date, the Navy reassigned him. He would command the USS Santa Fe instead:…

In the spring of 1999, John Doerr walked into a conference room at Google’s Mountain View office carrying a PowerPoint deck of thirteen slides. The company had just closed $11.8 million in funding, had fewer than forty employees, and had been operating for less than a year. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brilliant engineers…

Brené Brown spent nearly two decades studying what she calls “the anatomy of courage.” Her TED talk on vulnerability has over 60 million views. Her earlier books, “The Gifts of Imperfection” and “Daring Greatly,” turned her into one of the most recognizable voices in American self-help. But “Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole…

Leaders Eat Last was published in January 2014 by Portfolio/Penguin. Simon Sinek, best known for his TED talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” and his earlier book Start with Why, follows up here with a deeper and more biologically grounded investigation into what makes teams work. The title comes from a practice Sinek observed in…

Outliers: The Story of Success arrived in bookstores in November 2008 and went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for eleven consecutive weeks. Malcolm Gladwell, already known for The Tipping Point and Blink, had trained his lens on a question that sounds straightforward: why do some people…

The Idea That Started It All Phil Knight graduated from Stanford Business School in 1962 and, instead of taking a job, spent a year traveling the world. In Japan, he visited the Onitsuka Tiger factory and, on an impulse, told the manufacturer he represented a company called Blue Ribbon Sports. He had no such company….