Tomes by these industry experts will bring you maximum success

How do you scale the pinnacle of achievement? With a little help from these classic reads:
Bill Gates

Gates says that My Years with General Motors by Alfred Sloan is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business. He also endorsed Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker and said it is his "favourite book of the last decade; it is a long but profound look at the reduction in violence and discrimination over time".



Rohan Murty

It's no secret that Murty is an avid reader and supporter of books. However, he says that his love for the classics was developed early on when he read 14 books on Byzantine history. Using a rating system on his website, he lists his top four books as Men of Mathematics by E T Bell, 1984 by George Orwell, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel and Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner.



Jeff Bezos

Amazon CEO Bezos swears by The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. He reportedly said about Kazuo's book that, "If you read it, you can't help but come away and think, I just spent 10 hours living an alternate life and I learned something about life and about regret."



Dilip Shanghvi

Founder and managing director of Sun Pharmaceuticals, he says he enjoyed reading How I Did It: Lessons From The Front Lines of Business, a compilation of essays from the Harvard Business Review.



Rajiv Bajaj

When Bajaj was struggling with the diminishing image of the Bajaj brand, he came across the writings of Jack Trout. First, he swore by Trout and Al Ries' book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, and later on, relied on Differentiate or Die to rebuild his brand. He and Trout make an interesting pair, that's for sure.



Steve Jobs

He was a minimalist in his approach but not when it came to picking a book list that inspired him. One finds that he was influenced by many books, most notably The Innovator's Dilemma, Autobiography of a Yogi, Shakespeare, Plato and Moby Dick.



Larry Ellison

Napoleon by Vincent Cronin features on Ellison's favourites list. He says, "It's interesting to read about him for a couple of reasons: to see what one man of modest birth can do with his life, and to see how history can distort the truth entirely."