Every year about this time, I reflect on the top 10 (or so) books that really stood out to me as someone interested in how companies succeed over the long run and how managers and frontline people alike can make the decisions necessary to achieve that success among the hyper-competitive, global markets we face today.

These are, as you might imagine, overwhelmingly of the non-fiction variety, but they are not, strictly speaking, always "business books". That's the case again for 2007, as many of the titles describe as much social phenomena and cognitive skills as they do business strategy.

So, this year, in recognition of the presence of more than one such non-business title on my top 10 list and the fact there are 27 of them, I decided to just call it my "My Favorite Books for Business 2007", in the list below, all having been released sometime in 2007 and are listed in the order in which I most enjoyed them. That said, my favorite book of 2007 was "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Chip and Dan Heath and first runner-up "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Enjoy!

(read more)