BYU Marketing Lab’s 2021 Booklist
The BYU Marketing Lab values learning and personal growth, so we decided to compile a book list of our favorite reads! After spending a year collecting book recommendations from our lab consultants, we’re excited to present our 2021 favorites. May they help you become wiser, happier, and a more complete professional.
Marketing
How Brands Grow by Byron Sharpe
Powerfully contradicts a lot of marketing principles that are foundational to how business is done.
Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall
The foremost authority on innovation and growth presents a path-breaking book every company needs to transform innovation from a game of chance to one in which they develop products and services customers not only want to buy, but are willing to pay premium prices for.
Buy - Ology by Martin Lindstrom
Drawing on a three-year, 7 million dollar, cutting-edge brain scan study of over 2000 people from around the world, marketing guru Martin Lindstrom's revelations will captivate anyone who's been seduced - or turned off - by marketer's relentless efforts to win our loyalty, our money and our minds.
Career and Self-Improvement
Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
How your mind tricks you into thinking perception is reality, and how we are really poor judges of what will make us happy.
The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, and Problem Solving by Barbara Minto
As you can tell it's super enthralling but it could be one of the most useful things I've ever read in terms of structuring reports/presentations & arguments. I highly recommend it to everyone.
Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday
Perfect read to help me enjoy the quiet of social distance. It has elements of Essentialism or The Power of Now, but I enjoyed the read and storytelling approach a lot more.
Talking With Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.
The Squiggly Career by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis
Workbook style book about discovering strengths and weaknesses and accepting variability and eventual growth in professional life.
Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
This book is a game changer for personal finance, and is super short too.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
We might be a little biased because the author did his undergraduate work here at BYU, but we think this is a book for everyone, not just those in business careers.
General Inspiration
Surprised by Joy and The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Some timeless wisdom from the off-cited Christian writer.
Becoming by Michelle Obama
“A serious work of candid reflection by a singular figure of early-twenty-first-century America . . . Becoming is refined and forthright, gracefully written and at times laugh-out-loud funny.”—Isabel Wilkerson, The New York Times Book Review
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at New York University Law School. He has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued five times before the Supreme Court, and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. He has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant.
Fun
The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
Inspired by true events, this book celebrates female friendship and the power of reading.
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl, Bernadette Dunne
A fun read about a 1990’s New York Times food critic who used disguises to rate restaurants.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
If you are a Hunger Games fan, then this book is for you! It’s a prequel to the original series and gives the backstory on President Snow.
Formic Wars Trilogy (Earth Awakens, Earth Afire, Earth Unaware) by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston
Another prequel, this series takes place 100 years before Ender’s Game.
The Rook by Daniel O'Malley
Harry Potter meets James Bond with an awesome female protagonist!
