2008's most sold
BT culled India’s top-selling business books of 2008 from the country’s leading publishers. The result was an eclectic mix that ranged from management tips dispensed by global gurus to studies on consumer behaviour.
PENGUIN
Rama Bijapurkar
Price: Rs 304
Pages: 490
Why has Coke or Pepsi not yet made a profit in India after 15 or so years? Why is Kellogg’s cereal still not popular? The author shows that most MNCs think that what works in Europe and the US will also work here. But it doesn’t. Taking cues from economics, demography, history, culture, philosophy and just plain common sense, Rama Bijapurkar deciphers the complex animal that is the Indian consumer market.
Tarun Khanna
Price: Rs 589
Pages: 368
The author compares and contrasts both China’s and India’s entrepreneurial ecosystems and shows how both countries have contradictory policies, which lead to paradoxical results. Through detailed profiles of companies and individuals, Khanna explains that while their social and economic systems are vastly different, these countries have complementary strengths. Global companies need to start thinking of the two nations as one, rather than separately.
Ram Charan
Price: Rs 290
Pages: 192
Anyone interested in moving beyond traditional ways of handling sales will find this book invaluable. Charan suggests evolving sales people from mere order takers to knowledge gatherers who have the skills and mindsets of general managers. His method involves Value Creation Selling, where a salesforce focusses on a customer’s profitability before its own success.
MACMILLAN
Insurance for Everyone
Kshitij Patukale
Price: Rs 160
Pages: 328
This book is a comprehensive guide on the various kinds of insurance, from non-life to health, that the common man is able to easily digest. Patukale also unveils small but important tricks in how to buy maximum insurance protection that has a minimum premium as well as how to successfully file and receive insurance claims.
Ann Gilley
Price: Rs 225
Pages: 144
Gilley focusses on the obstacles that managers face when others resist change before, during and even after the process has been implemented. From wholesale reengineering to installation of new software, she explains that resistance to these kinds of change is natural, and offers practical aproaches to overcome organisational inertia.
RANDOM HOUSE
Business Stripped Bare
Richard Branson
Price: Rs 535
Pages: 352
Swashbuckling business mogul and ace adventurer Branson shares riveting details about his most risky, brilliant and audacious deals. Branson explains how he tried to take on one of the world’s biggest superbrands, how he plans to change the course of the world’s rivers to cut carbon emissions and which businessmen around the globe he is truly in awe of.
Martin Lindstrom
Price: Rs 539
Pages: 256
A groundbreaking study of what makes consumers tick, the author employed brainscanning technology to reveal what goes on inside our heads when we see an advertisement, or taste two rival brands of drink.
We learn, for example, that anti-smoking campaigns actually make people smoke and that product placement in films rarely works.
Lee Cockerell
Price: Rs 306
Pages: 288
Cockerell shares the ten practical, common sense strategies that guided his own journey from a poor farm boy in Oklahoma to the head of operations for Walt Disney World Resort Operations. Cockerell packs in business wisdom along with insightful and entertaining stories that show us how we can all become better leaders.
HARPER COLLINS
Jack Welch
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 372
Winning is chockfull of management wisdom that super-CEO Jack Welch built up through four-and-a-half decades of work at GE. His advice focusses on cultural values such as candor, differentiation among employees, and inclusion of all voices in decision-making, to issues of hiring and firing as well as crisis management.
Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
Price: Rs 195
Pages: 111
Wildly popular since 1992, the authors exhort managers to set one-minute goals, dispense one-minute praises and levy oneminute reprimands. The implementation of all three will boost productivity through increased employee morale, say the authors.
