Five Books That Have Shaped My Business Career

A set of excellent books to help you on your own business career journey

Hello there, friends! So you might not be aware of this, but since I’ve not always had this inclination toward machine learning, my prior ambition was to grow my career in a more traditional business role. In fact, that’s just what I did prior to becoming a machine learning engineer. I have served in roles ranging from scrum master to business architect, and both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees are in business-oriented fields.

Naturally, this meant I chose to read a lot of books to specifically help grow my career in this direction. Now to be completely honest, I found most books I read to be, well… not that great. I don’t necessarily want to dismiss them as worthless, but many business books today land on one great idea that could have been easily written as a short blog post but instead get extrapolated with a bunch of anecdotes and stories that are fun at best and time wasting at worst. So I’ve essentially given up on reading any books with the explicit label of “business” in recent years in favor of reading math, data science, or pure philosophy books. The occasional biography is also great, too.

(In case you’re curious, I’m currently reading Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz, which is an excellent introduction into the truly wonderful world of calculus.)

Of course, there are a few that stand out in my mind as really excellent, and that’s what this post is about! Whereas I mentioned that many business books could be easily summarized in something as short as a blog post, all these books are worth reading from cover to cover. They’re all jam packed with lots of great information, and I’ve re-read probably all of these several times over, each re-reading offering something new I didn’t catch before. There’s no particular hierarchy to this list, as I reserve the option to create another one of these lists in the future. 😂

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Kicking off this list with one I’m sure you’ve heard of, I have to say that the classics are indeed classics for…