Every year I give books to friends and clients. Since book reviews are not my business, every year, I cast about for lists of the best business and leadership books. 

Many of the lists I find are best seller lists.  That's not helpful.  I don't want to know which authors are the best promoters.  I want a list of excellent business books.

I reject other lists because they've got idiosyncratic criteria.  Jack Covert, from 800CEORead does excellent reviews of lots of books, but when he makes up his list, one criterion is that the book must have changed the way Jack views the world. 

I'm not after anything quite so grand.  Lots of great business books remind me of important things. An example from last year would be Jack and Suzy Welch's book, Winning.  There was nothing earth-shattering.  No visions of the world changed.  But there was lots of good and helpful opinion and information.

So, what I'm looking for are lists of "best" business books by informed book pickers.  I found three such lists this year.

From BusinessWeek: Best Business Books of 2006
BusinessWeek's top book is The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.  It's about Malcolm McLean, the man who invented the shipping container.  It's a great story that I wrote about when McLean died in 2001.

From Strategy and Business: The Top Shelf
The neat thing about the Strategy + Business is that it's a selection of individual books in a number of categories. Under "Negotiation," for example, the editors pick Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate.

From Amazon: The Editors' Top Ten Picks for Best Business Books of 2006
The top pick here is Chris Anderson's The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. I didn't like this one much.  I thought it was a puffed-up article that was distressingly lacking in specifics.

From the Toronto Globe and Mail: Harvey Schachter's Best Business Books of 2006
This is my favorite list.  Schachter is a great reviewer with a sense of what practical, in-the-trenches managers like to read.  His top choice is Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer's great book, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense.

Checking these lists out will give you some good ideas about what to give and what to read for your own development.

It's not on any of these lists, but if you have people working for you, and you have to talk to them about their behavior and performance, you should buy my latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership.