Books for MBA Admits to Help Ensure Career Success

Earning your MBA will take you a long way towards achieving your career goals, but most MBAs (including ones from Harvard, Stanford, etc.) still augment their reading with career success books. We hope you enjoy our recommendations.

Get Hired! Grow. Lead. Live. by Hal Eastman

This is a great book that has been poorly marketed. (We assume you are reading our reviews to uncover such ‘hidden nuggets.’) Author Hal Eastman is a Stanford MBA. He founded two small companies and was president of two large, publicly traded companies. He has accumulated a lot of wisdom after a 30-year business career and this book is crammed with advice for career success. Please don’t be misled by the title. The first chapter is 16 pages and deals with the job search process. The rest of the book is chocked full of valuable career advice that will benefit readers beyond the mid career stage.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown by day and author extraordinaire in his part time, presents actionable steps to increase your concentration and focus to become more productive and successful. His contrarian viewpoint, in our opinion at least, has produced yet another impactful book that is well worth a place on your reading list.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

Have you heard “follow your passion” so many times that you just assume it must be true? This book is meant for you. Cal Newport, an author we like so much, we’ve reviewed two of his books on this page, makes a compelling case for why this advice is actually wrong and argues that passion only enters the equation after you have put in the hard work to succeed.

Boost: Create Good Habits Using Psychology and Technology by Max Ogles

While this book was ostensibly written to help developers create more enticing products, it has great insights for forming positive habits as well as inspiring career path mapping. It’s a quick read and we are confident you will enjoy the ROI!

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

This is a best seller for good reason. Learn how to improve daily from James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation. If you are skeptical and think we are engaging in hyperbole, just check out the 100,000+ Amazon reviews. Or, better yet, ask around. Chances are at least some of your friends have already discovered this seminal masterpiece!

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

David Allen has overhauled this New York Times best seller to update it for his existing fans and we are confident it will also help establish a new generation of fans as well. We are also confident you will see why it is considered by many to be the seminal book on personal organization.

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Author Michael Hyatt has written a great gem of a book here. This 208 page guide is packed with tips to help you reduce your distractions and stay on course to productively completing your tasks — both professional and personal.