Best Business Books Bibliography - Bought, Borrowed or Browsed - 2006

Subscribing to the "Girl Marries Prince" philosophy of intelligence dissemination, I'll go straight to the punchline with my book of the year for 2006...

The Starfish and the Spider: the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations - From al-Qaeda to Skype, author Ori Brafman explores the new dynamics of organizational complexity that calls into question our understanding of the organization itself.

"If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies.

But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish."

As many of you have become accustomed to expecting of me this time of year, I am pleased to present my bibliography of the books that emerged in 2006 that changed the way I think about business and intelligence; I do so replete in the knowledge that, if you're like me, you face the paradox of enjoying an unquenchable appetite for such volumes invariably placed in conflict with the greater voracity of a busy schedule.

To make matters worse - or should I say better - 2006 was a year of profligate sumptuousness for new books on subjects relevant to those of us interested in intelligence and business making it all the more difficult for me to build a list bounded by some limits on the sheer quantity of books that really matter the most.

So, I decided to build TWO lists - an A List and a B List. But first, the other nine of my "Top 10 of 2006" - these really stand out as the important titles that emerged this year for our field (plus I can say in all honesty that I actually have borrowed, bought or browsed all 10 of them):

Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total... by Jeffrey Pfeffer $18.15	Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signa... by George S. Day $19.77	Risk Intelligence: Learning to Manage What ... by David Apgar $19.77
Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creati... by Curtis R. Carlson $18.15	Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the ... by Henry Chesbrough $23.10	Future, Inc.: How Businesses Can Anticipate... by Eric Garland $16.47
The Innovation Killer: How What We Know Lim... by Cynthia Barton Rabe $17.16	The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis $14.97	The Change Function: Why Some Technologies ... by Pip Coburn $17.22

But there are far more than a mere 10 books to deal with I'm afraid... so on to my lists.

The A-List are the 25 titles published during calendar year 2006 that, in my opinion, had the greatest impact on concepts and subjects focused on competition, decision-making, cognition, strategy, planning, marketing, research, innovation and various other non-fiction domains that matter to what we do and how we do it.

The B-List is a second set of 40 titles of recent publication (e.g., not necessarily published in calendar year 2006 but in the not-too-distant past which I finally got around to prioritizing forward) which also landed on my list of books that, as the title says, I bought, borrowed or browsed at some point this year and which have likewise impacted my thinking on what we do. These are not necessarily "lesser" titles - simply different from the A-List in their impact on me this year.

Alas, in all honesty, I must confess that, while my travel schedule furnished ample opportunities to skim all of these books at one point or another, I never actually finished reading any of them.

Perhaps this is testament to how easy it has become to get published these days... maybe it's evidence of the rich marketplace of ideas that has emerged in recent years... or even a bit of both: that we have such a deep talent pool to draw from today, no top 10 list can suffice to capture all of the truly great ideas that are put out in book form.

What do you think?

Thus, I present my complete 2006 Best Business Books Bought, Borrowed or Browsed Bibliography (how's that for alliteration?). As always, your comments, wisecracks, denunciations and differences of opinion are most welcome: