One of my favorite business books is 'Growing a Business' by Paul Hawken. It's from the 80ies, but much of his advice would look quite at home in a blog post by 37signals or some such.

This book is fantastic. It's a great book for bootstrappers.

I believe I ran across it on Fog Creek's book list which has some other good books as well.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum...

Not available on B&N and Amazon as eBook. Sigh.

It's worth killing the tree for.

Thanks, I ordered my copy from amazon.de. :) Guess it will take about 30 years to get here!

I would be careful to underestimate HN. The odds are better that there are people here who wrote 20- to 30-year-old business books.

That sounds nice, but on what reasoning do you base it? If I'm missing people, I'd sure like to know.

nickb isn't pg -- it was Peter Drucker. :-)

Seriously, you're missing people.

I've read some Peter Drucker.

It seems I am not alone:

quite a lot of results when typing this into google:

site:news.ycombinator.com Peter Drucker

Glad to hear it! I don't think I've seen him come up but I'm very glad he does. I am a big Drucker fan.

You might also find Charles Handy to be interesting - he's sort of a business spiritualist.

The Magic of Thinking Big (David Schwartz), from the 1960s IIRC, is great.

Yessss, it really is. I agree! It's one of my faves.

But I don't think I'd qualify it as a business book. Inspirational for sure, but it's not about DOING business exactly.