COMPETITIVE STRATEGY N COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE N THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF NATIONS
Michael Porter
strategy turned sexy because of one Harvard Business School professor, Michael Porter. Published in 1980, Competitive Strategy is what has guided thinking of a generation of managers and made "five forces" part of every manager's lexicon. In the sequel Competitive Advantage, Porter went on to look at how firms could sustain their competitive positions, while the third book examined what makes countries competitive and explained the phenomenon of "clustering".

BUILT TO LAST N GOOD TO GREAT
Jim Collins & Jerry Porras, Jim Collins
The first book is the story of 18 companies that had consistently outperformed the market over several decades. The secret of their success? Organisational values. These are what, the authors argued, define the raison d'etre of the organisation and remain constant, even as strategies and practices changed to reflect market realities. In the second book, which Collins authored alone, he looked at how companies that were not born with the perfect DNA (like those of Built To Last) could become great companies. This one-time Stanford professor is today is a hi-profile consultant.

MARKETING MANAGEMENT N KOTLER ON MARKETING
Philip Kotler
The first book was published way back in 1967 and forms the foundation of marketing courses at most B-schools. Over the years, Kotler has revised the edition to include concepts like segmentation and positioning , besides techniques like customer relationship management. Kotler On Marketing, on the other hand, is derived from what the marketing guru and professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business taught over a 20-year-period at his workshops around the world. The latter also talks about how to adapt to the new age of information-led marketing.

MANAGERS NOT MBAS: A HARD LOOK AT THE SOFT PRACTICE OF MANAGING AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT
Henry Mintzberg
This isn't the only book that Mintzberg, a professor at Canada's McGill university, has written. (The Rise And Fall Of Strategic Planning, Strategy Bites Back, and The Structuring Of Organizations are some others.) But we recommend this one for its sheer contrariness. Far from glorifying management education, Mintzberg takes it apart for overemphasising "the science of management, while ignoring its art and denigrating its craft, leaving a distorted impression of its practice". He would rather have MBA programmes take in experienced managers, who are then encouraged to learn from their own experiences. In a world swooning over MBAs, Mintzberg's is a sane voice.

REENGINEERING THE CORPORATION
Michael Hammer & James Champy
It's the book that spawned one of the most enduring buzzwords in the corporate world: reengineering. Hammer and Champy offered a simple premise in the book: That corporations had become inefficient because of decades of mass manufacturing engendered by the industrial revolution, and the only way to become competitive was to overhaul outdated processes and systems, and dramatically improve cost, quality and service efficiencies. The authors urged their readers to plan their organisational future from scratch and reengineer management as well, but unfortunately what most companies did was to downsize without reengineering.

CORE COMPETENCE OF THE CORPORATION N COMPETING FOR THE FUTURE
Gary Hamel & C.K. Prahalad
Strategic intent and core competence became powerful ideas after Hamel and Prahalad wrote Competing For The Future in the early-90s. In the book, which was preceded by an article in the Harvard Business Review (Core Competence Of The Corporation), Hamel and Prahalad encouraged companies to use stretch targets to gain competitive advantage, and clarified that core competencies were not core capabilities or technologies, but something that a company did much better than its competitors. Since then, many others have followed with their own definitions of core competence, but Hamel and Prahalad's work remains the most authentic.

THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER N MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Peter Drucker
Drucker, to put it simply, is the father of modern management. The Essential Drucker is a compilation of everything important that he wrote over 60 years of researching, consulting and teaching. Management Challenges... was published in 1999 and was immediately acknowledged as one of the most significant books of the decade. In it, Drucker, pushing 95, contends that we are now in an era of profound transition, where everything from income disparity to ageing population will impact business strategies.

IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE
Tom Peters & Robert H. Waterman
In search of excellence is what you get when management thinking gets patriotic. Written at a time when Japanese companies were invading American markets, the authors set about finding examples of excellence in US Inc. Disney, IBM and GE are some of the companies featured in it.

THE BALANCED SCORECARD: TRANSLATING STRATEGY INTO ACTION
Robert Kaplan & David Norton
First written about in the early 90s, The Balanced Scorecard proposed a new framework to translate strategy into action by setting goals along four "perspectives": Financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and innovation.

THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE
Peter Senge
If today we talk about learning organisations as the most natural thing, it's courtesy Senge, an MIT professor. According to him, there are five components to a learning organisation: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning. It's a book for all times.

THE FUTURE OF COMPETITION
C.K. Prahalad & Venkat Ramaswamy
As the title says, the book is a little futuristic, but there's ample evidence already that the "next practice" in customer value creation (which the authors call "co-creation") is happening. The good part: it pushes marketers to think out of the box.