The Best Business Parable Ever?

I must confess this has never happened to me before. Perhaps it is because it is an easy read. Or perhaps the message touched me somewhere deep inside or despite being a parable I could not guess the ending. Whatever be the reason, this is the first time I read the book in one go and immediately after finished started reading it once more. Read my review of The Go-Giver.
Of all the management parables I have read so far this must be the best and ranks, at least in my list, with The Goal, in terms of impact. Just so that I internalize the message (hopefully), I wrote down the 5 Laws of Stratospheric Success on a piece of paper. Slowly. Very slowly.

Picture courtesy: Daniel Wildman

5 Must Read Business Management Books

Why am I publishing this list ... because it is winter vacations for the kids. And if you haven't read these yet, now is your time to catch up. 5 should be sufficient for a short winter break.

1. Managing For Results by Peter Drucker. The mother of all Management Books. A book can be written for every paragraph of Managing for Results and I suspect many are.

2. The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. A business novel that will teach you a new way of thinking. I like to read this novel again and again and again.

3. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter Senge. Welcome to Systems Theory. Learn why time is an essential factor in any causal system. Application of its principles will turn your life and organization around.

4. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. A remarkable book, in my mind, only because the units of analysis are events and not companies. And also because CEO's in India use the term Blue Ocean Strategy to describe all their strategy.

5. Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense by Jeffery Pfeffer & Robery I. Sutton. Read this book last. You might not want to read any other management book ever after.

Note: The photograph used belongs to Zsuzsanna Kilián. Please see her galleryfor more such photographs.

The Goal

I first picked up The Goal when I was browsing through my company library about 15 years ago or so.
I had never heard of a 'management novel'.
Wasn't sure what to expect but the concept seemed interesting.
When I finished reading I was blown away.
This was it!
The only way to make anything stick was through a story.
I bet all of us remember many stories that we heard in our childhood.
Since then I must have read The Goal - first by borrowing the same book from the library multiple times and then by actually buying the book when I left the company - at least 15 times, if not more. One may not agree with the Theory of Constraints and denounce it as not very practical in all situations, one cannot deny that the books contain some gems. In any case Goldratt claims huge success using TOC. See here. And it all started with The Goal.
It is a story of a manager trying to save his job and marriage and manages to both (what else do you expect!) using the good old Socratic principles.
I followed up this book with The Critical Chain and It's Not Luck(sold in India as Goal II - shows the impact of the original one). The sequel and The Critical Chain do not leave the same kind of impact as The Goal does. But they are still worth a read.