The 3 Best Business Books of 2019

The 3 Best Business Books of 2019 (According to Every Other Best-of-2019 List)

11,000 business books are published every year. Here are the three you need to crush 2020.

In the world of business books, there are 11,000 titles published every year. The sheer volume of new books makes it impossible to sort through them all.

As readers, we need help, and that help arrives each November in the form of awards and best-of-the-year lists from media outlets and retailers, directing us to the favorites we already knew and surprises we may have missed.

This year, six of the best-known Best-of-Year lists for business books narrowed the list, but they still collectively recommended over 100 different titles. While the FT/McKinsey and Strategy + Business lists focus on corporate and global issues, Inc. magazine writes for entrepreneurs and small business owners. The retailers Porchlight Books, Bookpal and Amazon highlight titles like a bookstore, combining what they liked with what sold well.

For most readers, getting through every book on these lists would take up way more than a year’s worth of reading. I could add to the confusion by curating my own list of favorites. Instead, I decided to look at whether these six lists had any picks in common.

Each book tackles something we are all struggling with today: how to get better at solving complex problems, as individuals and as groups of people.

It turns out that there were three books that appeared far more frequently than others across lists this year, with each book appearing on five of the six lists I reviewed: Range by David Epstein, Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, and Loonshots by Safi Bahcall.

Narrowing 11,000 books to just three titles makes things wonderfully convenient. That kind of widespread agreement is rare. So naturally I had to read these books to find out why they were drawing such praise across the board, and what they might have to teach us as we step into the new year.