KACHARAGADLA

Reading recommendations from the Stanford GSB community. A reading list of books written or recommended by Stanford Graduate School of Business alumni and faculty: A  good book  is like food for the  soul . When you want to curl up by the fire with a truly great one, look no further than this list furnished by members of the  Stanford Graduate School of Business . If you've got an entrepreneur or two in your life , these might make good holiday gifts, too: 1. Good to Great : Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't, by Jim Collins Collins and his team did a rigorous study of businesses that excelled as compared to those that stayed mediocre. In his words, "Some of the key concepts discerned in the study fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people." 2. The Hard Thing About Hard Things : Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz Cofounder of VC firm Andreessen H

New research by Feng Zhu and colleagues reveals why sometimes it's better for fierce competitors like Apple and Amazon to work together L et's get one thing straight from the start: Apple and Amazon are not friends. If they were high school students, they'd be mean girls glaring at each other from opposite sides of the cafeteria, jealously forcing their friends to pick sides between Team Chloe and Team Madison. To put it into market terms, both companies would like nothing better than to have customers to themselves, wrapped up in their own seamless media universes: iTunes, iPad, and Apple TV on the one hand; and Kindle, Amazon Prime, and Fire TV on the other. So why would Amazon release a version of its Kindle Reader on Apple's iPad, allowing users to access its library of exclusive digital books? "Doesn't that diminish interest in the Kindle device?" asks Feng Zhu, an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management unit at Har