Top Business Strategy books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Business Strategy books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Business Strategy

Understanding the concepts of Business Strategy starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers

“Tilt challenges us to place customers at the heart of strategy. With product cycles shortening and product costs shrinking, this book brings to life a deeper understanding of how strategy can be made more powerful. A must-read.”

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy

The modern American economy was the creation of four men: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World

Accelerate highlights the iterative nature of the 8-step process, the importance of aligning people around a Big Opportunity, and how to create an organization that is both efficient and reliable, and fast and agile enough to respond to today's challenges.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World

"The Lords of Strategy" tells the story of the people and consulting firms that first defined what corporate strategy was. They showed the business world the benefits of making well-informed decisions about how you're going to compete. Will you try to beat the competition by having lower costs, for example?

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Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

“Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action” by Simon Sinek offers a fresh perspective on leadership and organizational success. By understanding the power of starting with “why,” leaders can inspire action, build trust, and foster meaningful connections with their teams and customers.

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Do More More Naturally: Empowering Effortless Success and the Freedom to Be Yourself

Imagine getting up every morning psyched for work and ending your day with plenty of energy for your personal life. What if you could do more than merely exist in survival mode?
How would you feel if you could thrive — without having to change who you are?
Authors David Kolbe and Amy Bruske invite you to break free from the mounting stress of your learned routines and embrace a new path …

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Additional Business Strategy Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Business Strategy, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

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

In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée 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, argu…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive.
In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Br…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Key Strategy Tools: The 80+ Tools for Every Manager to Build a Winning Strategy

Key Strategy Tools: The 80+ Tools for Every Manager to Build a Winning Strategy. "A fabulous compendium of tools, woven into a no-nonsense strategy process. An enormously helpful book, invaluable to novices and experts alike." "A really practical guide to strategy development.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss's head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives.

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Software as a Science: Unlock Limitless Recurring Revenue Without Losing Control

Every SaaS company on earth is careening towards its next revenue plateau. It’s called a Growth Ceiling—a moment in time where growth stops, and you’re losing just as many customers as you’re bringing in. It’s not an opinion—it’s just how recurring revenue businesses work.
The good news? Growth Ceilings are preventable—as long as you know how to predict them and apply the right revenue grow…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Specializations and Deeper Business Strategy Knowledge

You've got your basics in order – time to move on to some advanced and specialized concepts. Business Strategy is evolving every day, these books can help you master it.

Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy

Both successful entrepreneurs and chess grandmasters have the vision to look at the pieces in front of them and anticipate their next five moves. In this book, Patrick Bet-David translates this skill into a valuable methodology that applies to high performers at all levels of business. Whether you feel like you’ve hit a wall, lost your fire, or are looking for innovative strategies to take you…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise

What is strategy? For many it is the application of a theory, model or framework. In this book Spender develops a different creative approach. Emphasizing that firms face uncertainties and unknowns (knowledge gaps) he argues that the core of strategic thinking and processes rests on the organization's leaders developing newly imagined solutions to the opportunities that these uncertainties ope…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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