50 Top Business Books and How Long It Takes To Read Them
Reading is a common habit among ultra-successful people.
Many of today’s top business leaders and entrepreneurs — from Warren Buffett to Elon Musk to Bill Gates — credit reading a primary reason for their success.
And we know that that the wealthiest, most successful people tend to read non-fiction books (and in particular biographies and autobiographies of other successful people), opting to be educated over being entertained. They believe that books are a gateway to learning and knowledge.
Although not an absolute indicator of success, reading has been proven to strengthen the brain and sharpen your memory and thinking skills.
If you are looking to add more reading in your life, but also want to be mindful of the time commitment, this awesome visual from GetVoIP will help you strategically plan your book list. The visual highlights 50 top business books and how long it takes to read them.
You can start with books that take less than three hours like The Magic of Thinking Big and work your way up to a 14-hour read like the Steve Jobs biography.
Here is the full list and the average time it takes to read each book:
Biographies
- The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (2:32 hours)
- The Wright Brothers by David McCullough (5:49 hours)
- Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly (6:15 hours)
- Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business by Barbara Corcoran (6:30 hours)
- Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance (7:45 hours)
- Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie (13:50 hours)
- Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson (14:19 hours)
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (14:34 hours)
- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder (16:55 hours)
- Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow (20:19 hours)
Leadership / Management
- The One-Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard (2:24 hours)
- Leading Change by John P. Kotter (4:13 hours)
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (4:14 hours)
- Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (4:52 hours)
- Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brene Brown (4:55 hours)
- The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer by Jeffrey K. Liker (6:42 hours)
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell (6:49 hours)
- Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink (7:09 hours)
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (8:08 hours)
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (8:47 hours)
Productivity
- Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity by Tim Challies (1:39 hours)
- The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller (3:10 hours)
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H.Pink (3:27 hours)
- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland (3:53 hours)
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson (4:53 hours)
- Rework by Jason Fried (5:51 hours)
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg (6:21 hours)
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (6:49 hours)
- Mastery by Robert Greene (9:21 hours)
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (11:37 hours)
Growth
- The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz (2:25 hours)
- Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares (4:17 hours)
- Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore (4:36 hours)
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (5:00 hours)
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (5:12 hours)
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal (5:12 hours)
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert C. Cialdini (5:51 hours)
- Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull (7:27 hours)
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (9:01 hours)
- Principles by Ray Dalio (9:18 hours)
Entrepreneurship
- Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson (4:09 hours)
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel (4:33 hours)
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz (4:36 hours)
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (4:41 hours)
- Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh (4:48 hours)
- Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya (4:52 hours)
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries (5:03 hours)
- Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (5:51 hours)
- Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston (9:55 hours)
- The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by Noam Wasserman (9:55 hours)
There you have it — 14 days, 4 hours, and 44 minutes worth of reading. If you read even a fraction of these books, you’ll have a leg up on the competition.
Happy (and successful) reading!
