Top 10 Best Business Strategy Books: Must-Reads

January 9, 2023

What is Business Strategy?

Business strategy is the long-term direction of an organization. It encompasses decisions about products and services, pricing and marketing, as well as human resources and operations. The goal of a business strategy is to create value for customers, employees, and shareholders.

If you’re looking for some guidance on effective business strategies, there are many excellent books out there. To help you find the best business strategy books, here are some of our top picks:

Best Business Strategy Books

The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff

“I am hard pressed to think of another book that can match the combination of practical insights and reading enjoyment.”―Steven Levitt

Game theory means rigorous strategic thinking. It’s the art of anticipating your opponent’s next moves, knowing full well that your rival is trying to do the same thing to you. Though parts of game theory involve simple common sense, much is counterintuitive, and it can only be mastered by developing a new way of seeing the world. Using a diverse array of rich case studies―from pop culture, TV, movies, sports, politics, and history―the authors show how nearly every business and personal interaction has a game-theory component to it. Mastering game theory will make you more successful in business and life, and this lively book is the key to that mastery.

Business Strategy: A guide to effective decision-making (Economist Books)

by The Economist and Jeremy Kourdi

The effectiveness of a good strategy well implemented determines a business’ future success or failure. Yet history is full of strategic decisions, big and small, that were ill-conceived, poorly organized and consequently disastrous. This updated guide looks at the whole process of strategic decision-making, from vision, forecasting, and resource allocation, through to implementation and innovation.

Strategy is about understanding where you are now, where you are heading and how you will get there. There is no room for timidity or confusion. Although the CEO and the board decide a company’s overall direction, it is the managers at all levels of the organization who will determine how the vision can be transformed into action. In short, everyone is involved in strategy.

But getting it right involves difficult choices: which customers to target, what products to offer, and the best way to keep costs low and service high. And constantly changing business conditions inevitably bring risks. Even after business strategy has been developed, a company must remain nimble and alert to change, and view strategy as an ongoing and evolving process.

Creative Strategy and the Business of Design

by Douglas Davis

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity–you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn’t teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done. Creative Strategy and the Business of Design fills that void and teaches left-brain business skills to right-brain creative thinkers.

Inside, you’ll learn about the business objectives and marketing decisions that drive your creative work. The curtain’s been pulled away as marketing-speak and business jargon are translated into tools to help you:

–Understand client requests from a business perspective
–Build a strategic framework to inspire visual concepts
–Increase your relevance in an evolving industry
–Redesign your portfolio to showcase strategic thinking
–Win new accounts and grow existing relationships

Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans”–untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes:

A new preface by the authors: Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red
Updates on all cases and examples in the book, bringing their stories up to the present time

Two new chapters and an expanded third one–Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps –that address the most pressing questions readers have asked over the past 10 years

Strategy for the Corporate Level: Where to Invest, What to Cut Back and How to Grow Organisations with Multiple Divisions

by Andrew Campbell

A revised edition of the bestselling classic

This book covers strategy for organisations that operate more than one business, a situation commonly referred to as group-level or corporate-level strategy. Corporate-level strategy addresses four types of decisions that only corporate-level managers can make: which businesses or markets to enter, how much to invest in each business, how to select and guide the managers of these businesses, and which activities to centralise at the corporate level. This book gives managers and executive students all the tools they need to make and review effective corporate strategy across a range of organisations.

Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja , Aditya Agashe

Authored by 3 Product Managers at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, Swipe to Unlock is a comprehensive guide on the must-know concepts of technology and business strategy. It is a must-read for anyone pursuing product management, design, marketing, consulting or business strategy roles in the tech industry.

***Swipe to Unlock was updated in 2019 to include over 40 pages of new content to cover the latest developments in the world of tech.*** We highly recommend buying our book directly from Amazon rather than a third-party seller as it’s the only way to ensure you get the latest version.

This #1 Amazon Business Bestseller won a medal from the North American Book Awards and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Business Insider. Swipe to Unlock was touted as “our generation’s Rosetta Stone for enabling anyone to peer into the technology changing everyday life” by Jeremy Schifeling.

How does Spotify determine what songs to recommend to you?
How did KaiOS become the third largest mobile operating system in just two years since launching?
Why does Amazon offer free shipping with Prime if it loses them money?

How did a single typo take down 20% of the internet?
Why did Microsoft acquire LinkedIn?

By answering real-world questions like this, Swipe to Unlock gives you a peek under the hood of the technology you use every day, decodes tech’s biggest buzzwords, and shows you how technology is changing the society we live in for better or for worse.

The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design

by Marty Neumeier

THE BRAND GAP is the first book to present a unified theory of brand-building. Whereas most books on branding are weighted toward either a strategic or creative approach, this book shows how both ways of thinking can unite to produce a “charismatic brand”—a brand that customers feel is essential to their lives. In an entertaining two-hour read you’ll learn:

• the new definition of brand
• the five essential disciplines of brand-building
• how branding is changing the dynamics of competition
• the three most powerful questions to ask about any brand
• why collaboration is the key to brand-building
• how design determines a customer’s experience
• how to test brand concepts quickly and cheaply
• the importance of managing brands from the inside
• 220-word brand glossary.

Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy, Second Edition

by Linda Holbeche

In the new edition of her ground-breaking book, Linda Holbeche answers this question and provides the tools and insights to help HR managers and directors add value to the organization by implementing effective HR initiatives that are aligned to core business strategies.

Featuring updated profiles and case studies from top HR strategists who have used their skills to deliver a variety of key business objectives, Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy, 2nd edition provides inspiration and guidance on how to apply the theory to challenges in your organization.

Learn how you can strengthen and prove the relationship between people strategy and business success through your approach to performance and development and impress at the highest levels with this new edition of an HR classic.

Grassroots Strategy: Cultivating B2B Growth from the Ground Up

by Jeff W Bennett and Darrin W Fleming

A powerful yet practical guide to B2B strategic growth, it’s like a mini-MBA.

Accelerating profitable growth has been one of the long-standing challenges of business executives. Even today, with stock markets booming and M&A activity returning to record levels, organic growth is anemic for many companies. The root cause is a lack of strategy in the organization’s thinking, planning, and marketing. Many successful business leaders have built their careers on execution and efficiency but have relatively little experience making the strategic decisions that drive both the top and bottom line. Lean, Six Sigma, and other efficiency-focused methodologies are fantastic at answering questions on how to do things better. Still, they are not suited to answer strategic questions around what they should do and why.

Grassroots Strategy conveys what has historically been considered complex concepts in a simple to read and approachable way through stories, case studies, and a little humor. The book provides a framework for finding growth in the sweet spot between market needs and a company’s capabilities. Bennett and Fleming present practical tools and principles that can unleash growth potential and prove that the myth that the right strategies must emerge from senior executives, consultants, and mystical seers in an ivory tower is debunked. With the proper training and environment, they can come from almost anywhere in an organization.

Scholes and Wolfson's Taxes and Business Strategy

by Merle Erickson, Michelle L. Hanlon

Taxes and Business Strategy provides a framework for understanding how taxes affect decision-making, asset prices, equilibrium returns, and the financial and operational structure of firms.