In 2014 Bill Gates told us which book he considered the best business book he had ever read. He named a book that Warren Buffett had recommended to him 20 years earlier: Business Adventures, by John Brooks, from the 1960s.
Bill Gates acknowledged that this book is to business what Graham’s The Intelligent Investor is to investing: books that, however much time goes by, will keep the timeless fundamentals of their subject.
Although Gates had never come across the book or heard of its author, he says he was fascinated by it, and he recommends it to any entrepreneur.
What will you find in Business Adventures?
You will learn about the successes and difficulties of companies such as Ford, General Electric and Xerox, among others, and the strategies they used to solve their problems, as well as some stories from Wall Street and stock market disasters that repeat themselves today just as they did in the past.
Gates says one of the stories in the book that caught his attention most was that of Xerox, a story he recommends to any businessperson.
Following Bill Gates’s words, sales of this little-known book shot up in the United States. The problem was that it was not available in Spanish, though it is now: the Spanish edition is titled Aventuras empresariales.
Featured image: Greg Gjerdingen, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
