Early Career Reading List - 10 Book Recommendations for Recent Grads

John J. Schaub 

Oct 20, 2022 

In my free time I teach Business School postgrads and regularly get asked questions to the effect of "What books should I read?". This post is an attempt to provide a top 10 list of books for folks just starting out that I can point students to in the future. The goal of this list is not to focus on any one topic but to give a broad base of books that folks new to their career might benefit from. You will notice a distinct lack of recent publications on this list, this is very much a demonstration of survivorship bias. The fact is the vast majority of books ever published are not very good. Those books that have been around for a few years and are still getting accolades are much more likely to be worth your time then something recently published but even those books have flaws and I’ve tried to point some of those out below.

1. How to Lie with Statistics - We live and work in a world where data is everywhere but too often those that have less background in data analysis mistake data for truth and do not comprehend how easy it is to even unintentionally create a deceiving story out of completely factual data. “How to Lie with Statistics” is an extremely approachable introduction to the techniques most often used to deceive and should be required reading for anyone in a decision making capacity in business. The book was first published in 1954 and has been regularly republished since so I'm far from the only person to recommend it. At 144 pages with large print and a number of illustrations you can get through this one on a short flight and be better off for it. The only real criticism I'll offer is that the language and examples are ancient which can be fun but can occasionally leave you reaching for Google to figure out what the author is even talking about.

2. How to win friends and influence people - Another classic that has been in print for decades. Given this book was written in 1936 by a guy who changed his name to Dale Carnegie to imply he was related to Andrew Carnegie the fantastically wealthy Scottish American businessman upon whom the character of Scrooge McDuck is based you could be forgiven for wondering why this book would ever make any reading list. The reality is you need to read it both because it does actually have some very solid advice but more importantly because I can pretty much guarantee that every single salesperson and halfway ambitious middle manager you will ever encounter has read it and being able to spot the standard approach is very worthwhile. There are some very fair criticisms of this book elsewhere but if you apply an ounce of common sense and use the advice it provides intelligently you won’t come off as a used car salesman and can actually benefit from reading it.

3. Gates of Fire - Stepping away from purpose written business books ‘Gates of Fire’ is historical fiction telling the story of the battle of Thermopylae where a Greek army led by 300 Spartans defeated an invading Persian army. This book is extremely well written and presents one of those moments in history when the decisions of individuals and small groups changed history forever so it is worth a read for that reason alone. It is on this list however because it is a fantastic look at styles of leadership and what it takes to motivate groups of people to go well beyond what should be possible. 

4. The four hour workweek - I’m not sure if you are legally allowed to write a suggested reading list for Business students without recommending “The four hour workweek” by Tim Fiess so here it is. This book is another classic that will have been read by every startup founder and senior executive you will ever meet so it is worth reading on that basis alone. There are some excellent pieces of advice in this book which is why it has had such continued popularity but the book is bluntly tone deaf and gets a lot of criticism for oversimplifying the sorts of challenges people can face. Again if you apply an ounce of common sense and read a little critically you will get very real value from it. The meta value in this book which is so often missed is the demonstration of the incredible insight that can be gained with the simple application of an order of magnitude constraint adjustment. In simple terms in any strategic planning session you should ask a question like “What would we do if we had one tenth as much X?” where X can be money, time, staff, physical space ect. This exercise will quickly help you focus on the most important aspects of what you are trying to accomplish and might allow you to free up resources you previously felt were fully committed.

5. The Economist: Negotiation: An A-Z Guide - This book is essentially a dictionary of negotiation terms, tactics and tricks. The dictionary style presentation can make reading it cover to cover somewhat difficult but the information presented is without question valuable particularly to someone starting out. The real selling point of this book and a lot of the other long form content presented by The Economist is that they try to avoid the pollyannaish view of business taken by some authors and actually present things as they are in the real world.  

6. Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game - The true story of the 2002 Oakland-Athletics baseball team and head coach Billy Beane who revolutionised the game of baseball by making use of analytics. The book is extraordinarily well written and there is also a film version which is very much worth a watch. At its core this book is a lesson in how the flaws in your opposition's understanding of the world can be ruthlessly exploited allowing you to outperform them even with drastically fewer resources at your disposal. The bigger lesson that is only really clear when you understand the context in which the book was written is that the advantage gained by new insights will evaporate as your opponent adapts and they will adapt quickly. In the world of baseball the approach pioneered by Beane was in common use by 2006 three years after the book was published.

7. The Intelligent Investor - Warren Buffet calls it “the best investing book ever written” and I’m simply not qualified to disagree with Warren Buffet. The real value of The Intelligent Investor is that it quickly removes you from the headline news and social media buzz driven thought process of business and reminds you that the basic premise has not changed in a century and likely never will. From a pure career point of view it is very important to remember that trends will come and go but you are working to build something that will last decades so maybe going all in on the latest iteration of Beanie Babies is not the right approach.

8. A Short History of Financial Euphoria - The biggest takeaway of this lighthearted look at financial armageddon is the way that every generation or so humanity remakes the same mistakes in new and interesting ways. The timing on this book was incredible published only a few years before the dotcom bubble really got going it somehow managed to get completely ignored regardless.

9. The 7 habits of highly effective people - This book may represent the invention of the clickbait title before clickbait titles mattered. The reason I recommend this book is that it focuses on real concrete and actionable changes that an individual can make. Too often books of this sort will focus on the extreme high end strategic thinking which while valuable is often not the problem that people struggle with particularly early in their career. This book helps you get better at the day to day so that you can get good enough to be faced with the strategic problems the other books are talking about.

10. Dow 40,000 - ‘Dow 40,000 is the masterwork that in 1999 predicted the unprecedented 17 year stock market boom brought on by the arrival of the Internet’ would make a great opening to a book recommendation but it is of course completely nonsensical. Published shortly before the dotcom crash and two years before 9/11 Dow 40,000 is frequently mentioned as one of the worst business books of all time and to be fair the entire premise of the book is spectacularly bad. It is bad at a level that is hard to comprehend looking back with 20+ years of hindsight and yet it got published by a major publisher and was well reviewed by at least some people at the time. I recommend students give it or some other spectacularly failed ‘big prediction’ book to get a real in the moment sense of how seemingly intelligent people can believe transparently stupid things and make decisions and recomendations that two decades later are incomprehensible. Group think is a real risk in many places and seeing it up close is a solid method to at least help you understand it. Whenever you read one of these ‘big prediction’ books you should keep in mind Laplace's principle, “the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness”.