The Best Books of 2008 - Business Pundit Edition

Business Pundit knows business books well, and has chosen the 10 from 2008 they think are the best. I think they have the right idea in describing the popular feelings of the year:

2008 came in two parts. Part I, which ran through Bear Stearns, carried the vestiges of prior years, when we thought we could get away with everything, never anticipating that in actuality, everything would get away from us. Some of the books on this list reflect that optimistic, braced mentality, when words like "social networking" still gave us more jitters than "401K."

The chosen 10 are:

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris, PublicAffairs

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe, Crown

The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation by A. G. Lafley & Ram Charan, Random House (Jack Covert Selects)

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, Yale University Press (Jack Covert Selects)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely, HarperCollins (Jack Covert Selects)

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam, Portfolio (Jack Covert Selects)

A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter, Harvard Business School Press (Jack Covert Selects)

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, Bantam

No qualms with that list here. As you can see, half of them were Jack Covert Selects. And I think they're right in stating "If these books don't cover every event of the year, they certainly cover the thought processes that trace through it." I would also recommend today's Business Pundit post on The Personal MBA. We've been big fans of the idea for some time, having published Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA Manifesto on ChangeThis in late 2005. And, we've posted it before, but here is the link to Business Pundits 25 Best Business Books Ever.