Books for Business Owners

As an editor, I get a lot of books in the mail to review. Unfortunately, we don't get to use them very often in MyBusiness. Book reviews generally aren't our thing, and when we need an expert to quote, we usually just go to the best experts we know: small business owners with experience running their own operations.

I give the books a quick glance before filing them away on the shelf for future use, and I think this New York Times column sums up the impression I get from the business book genre as a whole:

"Books aimed at the small business and entrepreneur audience far too often fall into two categories," writes Paul Brown. "There is the 'how I made $27 trillion in business, and you can too,' genre or the ones that say you only need to take care of customers (or cash flow or sales or something else) and you will be the envy of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates."

Brown doesn't leave us with just that wisdom. He goes on to mention four business books that are worth your time (if for no other reason than they don't fall into one of the two aforementioned categories.

Take a look at one or all of his picks (at least one of which is sitting on my desk as I type). Who knows, you might take away a tip or two to help you run your business better.