If you know who Jeff Hayzlett is, it is probably from his appearances on television or his Twitter footprint. But the chief marketing officer of Kodak is now venturing into the wonderful world of analog with his new book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?, being released by Business Plus in May. And he has done something in that book that I wish more authors would do. He has included an appendix in which he lists his “Business Library ‘Must’ List.” It gives you an idea of what has influenced him most over the years (and, just maybe, an idea of what to expect from his book). It includes:

• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
• How to Win Friend and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R Covey
• The Practice of Management by Peter F. Drucker
• The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do about It by Michael Gerber
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt & Jeff Cox
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca with William Novak
• What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
• Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. by Mitch Joel
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T Kiyosaki with Sharon L Lechter
• Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business by Jay Conrad Levinson
• Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition by Harvey MacKay
• The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
• In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Tom Peters & Robert H Waterman
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
• Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J Trump with Tony Schwartz
• The Art of War by SinTzu
• Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey
• Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar

Not only does his book get extra points from me for including a list of his favorites, Hayzlett himself gets extra credit for using a Garrison Keillor quote to introduce the list: “A book is a gift you can open again and again.”

Jurgen Appelo at Noop.nl has created and algorithm that takes the number of Amazon reviews, average Amazon ranking, and number of hits on Google to create the Top 100 Best Books for Managers, Leaders & Humans. In talking about some of the analysis Appelo says:

The book with the largest number of Amazon reviews is Freakonomics (#53, by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner). And the book with the largest number of Google hits is The World Is Flat (#56, by Thomas L. Friedman). However, both books scored a somewhat low average rating, which means they didn’t end up among the top 10. The book with the best average rating is Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em (#36, by Beverly Kaye, Sharon Jordan-Evans), though this book scored only a moderate number of reviews and Google hits.

Any experiment of this nature produces interesting results. You’ll find a mixture of old and new, common and uncommon. I have pulled over the top 10 off the list:

1. The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, Janet Switzer
2. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, E. B. White
3. How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
4. Made to Stick by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
5. Peopleware by Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister (out of print)
6. Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
7. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter
8. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras
9. Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
10. Getting Things Done by David Allen

You can find the rest of the list here. Appelo has a similarly constructed list for The Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books.

We have added Disqus, a new commenting system to the blog and it needs some love.

Tell us: What have you been reading this summer? Was it worth your time or should you have left it on the bookstore shelf?

No, I am not talking about our book.

Twitter was a-flitter with this message today:

RT @TPEntrepreneur Possibly the BEST list of business books ever. Totally unexpected stuff! http://budurl.com/xl2s

Mike Michalowicz, author of the Toliet Paper Entreprenuer, pulled together a list of 66 books recommended by the TPE community. I am always sucker for a good list of business books.

Mike says the problem with business books is “chances are you have read 90% of them already.” Based on our experience with The 100 Best, people have generally not read more than ten of our recommended books, so I am not sure that holds water. The biggest problem is that people don’t read the right books (check out our essay in Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine this week about this very problem).

Anyway, here is the list for you to look over and you can jump over to the TPE site for further commentary on each book:

1. The Key by Cheri Huber
2. Yes, You Can! by Sam Deep
3. The Winning Spirit by Lisa Wicker
4. Oh, The Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss
5. A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
6. How to Own the World by Stephen K Hayes
7. Click by George C Fraser
8. Critical Thinking by R. Buckminster Fuller
9. Improv by Keith Johnstone
10. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
11. Stirring It Up by Gary Hirshberg
12. The Discourses of Epictetus by Epictetus
13. The Brand YU Life by Hajj E Flemings
14. The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin
15. Ants at Work by Deborah Gordon
16. The Pawnshop Chronicles by Jack E Rossin
17. The Bible,The Koran & The Talmud
18. It’s Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden
19. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
20. One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer
21. The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten
22. The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga
23. WorkLaughs by Allen Klein
24. The SPEED of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey
25. Leaving Microsoft To Change The World by John Wood (800-CEO-READ is a huge fan of Room To Read)
26. The Saint, The Surfer, and The CEO by Robin Sharma
27. A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
28. Inner Game of Management by Flamholtz
29. Selling with Emotional Intelligence by Mitch Anthony
30. Wacky Days! by Tom Peric
31. The Purpose Driven Life by Warren Robert
32. Mozart’s Brain and The Fighter Pilot by Richard Restak
33. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
34. Thinking For A Change by Max Lucado
35. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
36. The Innovator’s Solution by Clay Christensen
37. The Ice Cream Maker by Subir Chowdhury
38. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
39. Millionaire in the Mirror by Gene Bedell
40. Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott
41. Shotgun Shopping by Sheevaun OConnor Moran
42. Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez
43. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
44. Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor
45. How to Make Luck by Marc Myers
46. The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald
47. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
48. The Tao Of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
49. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
50. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
51. The Silva Mind Control Method by Jose Silva
52. Power vs Force by David R. Hawkins
53. Quantum Leap Thinking by James Mapes
54. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
55. Power For Living by Jamie Buckingham
56. The Wizard of Ads by Roy Williams
57. The Power of Now by Eckhardt Tolle
58. You Can’t Send A Duck To Eagle School by Mac Anderson
59. Ripples from the Zambezi
60. The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson
61. Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
62. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
63. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma
64. Never Give Up by Joyce Meyers
65. Employee to Entrepreneur by Suzanne Mulvehill
66. Rubies in the Orchard by Lunda Resnick

(I wanted to get the list up quickly. We’ll add links and some comments over the next day or so.)