My 10 Most Referenced Books

Which books have most helped me understand and explain the business world

As regular readers know, I like books. I often write brief reviews of books I’ve recently read. Those reviews are usually pretty positive — likely due to selection bias, I tend to only finish books that have some value. So how is a reader to know which books are most helpful?

While I’ve written reviews of 74 books, I’ve referenced 134 books in the 300+ articles I’ve written at ClearPurpose. It seems that the number of times I’ve referenced a book would be a good indicator of how valuable that book is in making sense of the business world.

Based on that hypothesis, here’s the list of books (excluding my own) that I’ve most often referenced or quoted in articles at ClearPurpose (along with the links to the articles that reference each book):

• Built to Last (2020–07–01, 2020–07–24, 2020–08–11, 2020–08–17, 2022–03–14)
• Competitive Strategy (2020–06–28, 2020–07–01, 2020–07–27, 2020–09–03, 2022–07–19)
• Competing for the Future (2020–04–13, 2020–04–22, 2020–08–04, 2022–02–28, 2022–03–14)
• The Lean Startup (2020–04–24, 2020–05–12, 2021–03–11, 2021–03–27, 2022–10–25)
• Traction (2021–12–24, 2022–01–05, 2022–07–11, 2022–07–19, 2022–08–02)
• The Startup Owners Manual (2020–04–24, 2020–04–29, 2020–05–13, 2020–08–25, 2020–09–04, 2021–03–05)
• Business Model Generation (2020–04–06, 2020–04–08, 2020–04–15, 2020–04–23, 2020–04–23, 2020–05–01, 2020–07–01, 2020–09–10, 2022–07–19, 2022–10–25)
• Blue Ocean Strategy (2020–04–06, 2020–04–20, 2020–05–28, 2020–05–29, 2020–07–01, 2020–09–01, 2021–04–26, 2021–09–30, 2022–03–14, 2022–09–05, 2022–12–30)
• Value Proposition Design (2020–04–06, 2020–04–08, 2020–04–15, 2020–04–23, 2020–04–27, 2020–04–28, 2020–08–27, 2020–09–04, 2021–02–20, 2021–03–13, 2021–11–26, 2022–09–05, 2022–10–25)
• The Bible (2020–04–06, 2020–04–21, 2020–04–23, 2020–04–29, 2020–05–11, 2020–05–12, 2020–08–18, 2020–08–19, 2020–08–20, 2020–09–02, 2022–02–14, 2022–03–21, 2022–04–04, 2022–05–02, 2022–05–30, 2022–09–09)