Books by Business Leaders: Authors, Companies and Exam Traps

Competitive papers rarely ask a student to judge a book. They ask who wrote it. The Books and Authors section of SSC, Railway, Banking and State examinations carries one or two questions on titles written by industrialists, founders and chief executives, and the whole mark turns on a single pairing of a name with a title. This chapter collects the memoirs, management books and business histories that paper setters return to, sets them against their authors and the companies they describe, and marks the traps: the book written about a founder rather than by him, and the two Infosys names that are endlessly swapped.

Indian business leaders and their books

Two of these rows account for most of the marks. Imagining India belongs to Nandan Nilekani and A Better India: A Better World to N. R. Narayana Murthy; both men founded Infosys, and an option sheet that offers both names is testing exactly this. I Too Had a Dream is the memoir of Verghese Kurien, the engineer who built the Amul co-operative at Anand in Gujarat and chaired the National Dairy Development Board; his earlier collection of lectures is An Unfinished Dream. Kurien is also called the Father of the White Revolution, which lets a paper setter combine a books question with an Operation Flood question.

Global founders and chief executives

Books by investors and venture capitalists

A second cluster comes from the people who finance companies rather than run them. Zero to One was written by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters and argues that a new company should create something singular rather than copy a rival. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is by Ben Horowitz, who co-founded the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Principles by Ray Dalio sets out the rules by which he ran the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. Among Indian titles, Stay Hungry Stay Foolish by Rashmi Bansal profiles twenty-five entrepreneurs who studied at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; her later books are Connect the Dots, on entrepreneurs without a business degree, and I Have a Dream, on social entrepreneurs.

The commonest trap: about, not by

Several famous business books were written by journalists and biographers, and an option sheet will offer the founder's own name. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are authorised biographies by Walter Isaacson, not autobiographies. The Everything Store, on Amazon, is by Brad Stone; Jeff Bezos's own writings are collected in Invent and Wander. Business Maharajas, the study of India's leading industrial families, is by the business historian Gita Piramal, and Beyond the Last Blue Mountain, the life of J. R. D. Tata, is by R. M. Lala. Business Sutra, which reads Indian management through mythology, is by Devdutt Pattanaik, who is a writer and not a chief executive. Read the stem carefully: "written by" and "written about" are different questions.

How to revise this chapter

Learn the pairing in one direction first, book to author, because that is the direction the question is asked in. Then attach each author to a company, since a second question often asks which firm the writer led. Finally fix the handful of one-word clues that decide a close option: Nike for Shoe Dog, Sony for Made in Japan, Intel for Only the Paranoid Survive, IBM for Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, and Amul for I Too Had a Dream. Ten minutes on the two tables above is enough to secure the mark.