Just like I seem to learn much more about business from an Arctic explorer, many non-business books have had a profound effect on my thinking about business as well. Here are some of them.

• Crime and Punishment: every choice has consequences and these consequences in turn affect future choices.
• Long walk to freedom: the things worth fighting for often involve falling & getting up over and over again.
• The Alchemist: You won’t achieve much without faith!
• What should I do with my life (nice write-up here): when in doubt, reinvent yourself.
• The Now Habit: a large part of productivity is scheduling time for fun as well.
• Surviving your dissertation (or any write-a-research-paper book): the right answer often comes from triangulating many wrong ones.
• Drawing on the right side of the brain: Anyone can be an artist, it just requires the right perspective!
• The elements of style (free here): saying less often means saying more (and vice versa).
• The art of happiness: it’s about giving more than you take.

Enjoy!

Comparing this list to the last one, I think that business books (can) serve as a general framework for success in life and business (I didn’t list business-biographies and may do so later, as they make a slightly different point). These books, on the other hand, are about the softer interactions that go on: why are we here, what do we do it for, where are we going, how should we act towards each other and ourselves, etc. Life-stuff!

What good non-business book have you read that has had a profound influence on your life?

Vincent

I read too much and review too little. Following is a list of books, I’ve enjoyed and a single line to describe what I learned from them.

• What the CEO wants you to know: turnover is the lifeblood of a business.
• The E-Myth Revisited: assign roles and responsibility for every aspect of your organisation (even if it’s an organisation of one!).
• Valuation: behind every strategy should be solid financial reasoning.
• Positioning: every choice you make about the outside-face of your business will affect the way consumers perceive and buy you.
• The one-minute manager: You can’t manage people without setting clear goals, measuring results, and encouraging good / discouraging bad behaviour.
• Blue Ocean Strategy: focus on what your competitors can’t do.

Coming up (sometime in the near future): a number of one-line unconventional book-reviews!
Vincent out