11. Outsmarting Google: SEO Secrets to Winning New Business (Que Biz-Tech), by Evan Bailyn and Bradley Bailyn

If you aren’t at or near the top of Google searches, you won’t be found. Your company might as well not exist. But many common Google “search optimization” techniques don’t work–or even make things worse. Learn the real, gritty, up-to-the-minute tactics that helped Evan Bailyn attract more than 50,000,000 visitors last year without spending a dime on advertising!

12. Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, by Michael Hyatt

To be successful in the market today, you must possess two strategic assets: a compelling product and a meaningful platform. This step-by-step guide takes readers behind the scenes, into the new world of social media success. Hyatt shows you what best-selling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and other creatives are doing differently to win customers in today’s crowded marketplace.

13. Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services, by Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki, CEO of garage.com and former chief evangelist of Apple Computer, Inc., presents his manifesto for world-changing innovation, using his battle-tested lessons to help revolutionaries become visionaries.

14. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean (O’Reilly), by Ash Maurya

We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail–not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.

15. Screw Business As Usual, by Richard Branson

Richard Branson, one of the world’s most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it’s time to turn capitalism upside down-to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities and the planet. Branson suggests, “Doing the right thing can be profitable. I will show how this works step by step… It’s the core message of this book. I often say, ‘Have fun and the money will come.’ I still believe that, but now I am saying, ‘Do good, have fun and the money will come.'”

16. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek

Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty? In studying the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way-and it’s the complete opposite of what everyone else does.

17. $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future, by Chris Guillebeau

In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose – and earn a good living. Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck.

18. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, by John Maxwell

John C. Maxwell, an internationally respected leadership expert, speaker, and author who has sold more than 19 million books, distills everything he had learned about leadership into a handful of life-changing principles. Maxwell combines the insights learned from his thirty-plus years of leadership successes and mistakes with observations from the worlds of business, politics, sports, religion, and military conflict. The result is a revealing study of leadership.

19. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity–principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

20. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to change the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

Bonus Must Reads

21. The Magic of Thinking Big, by David Schwartz

Millions of people throughout the world have improved their lives using The Magic of Thinking Big. Dr. David J. Schwartz, long regarded as one of the foremost experts on motivation, will help you sell better, manage better, earn more money, and — most important of all — find greater happiness and peace of mind.

22. The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, by David Meerman Scott

This guide offers a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of the Internet to communicate with buyers directly, raise online visibility, and increase sales. Its about getting the right message to the right people at the right time – for a fraction of the cost of a big-budget advertising campaign.

23. The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, by Josh Kaufman

Getting an MBA is an expensive choice-one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping business school altogether.

24. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

25. Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill

Best-selling author Napoleon Hill teaches you the 17 success principles used by the great success stories of the early 20th century. Napoleon Hill interviewed with William Wrigley, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie and 500 others. He shares with you the secrets that helped all of these great leaders rise to the top in their respected industries. Many of today’s top achievers credit Napoleon Hill’s work as being the blueprint for their success.

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