Publishers in 2018 couldn’t match last year’s headline-grabbing business books: Ellen Pao’s tell-all about sexual discrimination at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Thomas Piketty’s tell-all about the ravages of rising inequality, to name two.
But, as Inc.com reports, there were plenty of great new titles. More books about women and the nature of work joined leadership and technology as popular subjects. And Ken Kocienda, who invented the iPhone’s autocorrect feature, explains why your device shows “duck” when you meant to type a different word.
Here are a few of Inc.com’s top 10 favorite business books of 2018:
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- “Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet,” by Claire L. Evans. What unites the female programmers, hackers, game designers, and others in this engaging counter-history is user empathy. Evans account begins with familiar foundational figures of computer science, such as Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, before segueing into the age of networks.
- “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” by Ken Kocienda. A 15-year Apple veteran with a hand in the company’s most iconic products, Kocienda offers a generous, self-deprecating guide to life under Jobs. The phrase “creative selection” riffs on Darwin: it casts product development as a long iterative process in which only the strongest design aspects survive.
- “Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied,” by Howard Yu. This deeply researched mix of strategy guide and business history is a strike against complacency. Competitive advantage comes and goes with the tide, as this book dives deep into.
