Bill Gates’ Favorite Business Book: The Secret To His Success?
Bill Gates has just revealed his favorite book about business. It’s decades old, far from famous, and it was out of print until Bill vouched for it. The book is called Business Adventures and it’s by a man named John Brooks. Brooks contributed to the New Yorker for years and decided to compile all of his stories about Wall Street and American business into one anthology, which ended up being Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ favorite business book of all time.
According to QZ.com, the book was originally lent to Bill Gates by fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, an investor who also considered Business Adventures to be his favorite book on the topic. It may come as a surprise to learn that the book isn’t a guide on how to get rich, but being Bill Gates’ favorite book might make people wonder if there’s anything in Business Adventures that helped Gates find his success.
According to Business Insider, Bill Gates claims a lot of the lessons in Business Adventures are still applicable.
“‘Business Adventures’ is as much about the strengths and weaknesses of leaders in challenging circumstances as it is about the particulars of one business or another,” Bill Gates said about the book. “In that sense, it is still relevant not despite its age but because of it. John Brooks’s work is really about human nature, which is why it has stood the test of time.”
It seems there are lots of tips and tricks that aspiring entrepreneurs and ambitious businesspeople can learn from Gates’ favorite book, including how to innovate to stay on top. Gates wrote a review of the book in The Wall Street Journal, saying:
“Unlike a lot of today’s business writers, Brooks didn’t boil his work down into pat how-to lessons or simplistic explanations for success. (How many times have you read that some company is taking off because they give their employees free lunch?) You won’t find any listicles in his work. Brooks wrote long articles that frame an issue, explore it in depth, introduce a few compelling characters, and show how things went for them.”
One of the chapters Bill Gates references is Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox, which you can download for free here, that talks about how the Xerox company revolutionized copying and changed the business market forever. This is a strategy that Bill Gates adhered to when starting up the Microsoft corporation. Gates invested a lot of money into new technologies and innovations to stay on the cutting edge of the electronics market. This strategy shot Gates’ company to the top, where it still stands strong.
For more on Bill Gates, read an Inquisitr report on Bill’s opinion about immigration reform.
