Business & Personal Finance

Are you having trouble finding just the right gift for the business-minded people on your gift list? Business books can give the recipient the opportunity to go on an adventure, get inspired and learn how to grow, both personally and professionally. Here are a few great titles for these hard-to-buy for people:

Bestselling author and sales expert Jeffrey Gitomer draws on years of experience to reveal the proven keys to closing sales and advancing your wealth. This foolproof guide will strengthen your ability to build relationships and forge new partnerships. It also teaches you how to overcome resistance, build trust and confidence and close sales at the best rates.

By following Gitomer's simple instructions, you will discover how to formulate the right closing question for each situation, create an irresistible sense of urgency and breed sales. There are specific facts pivotal to a successful sale. The Very Little but Very Powerful Book on Closing includes five crucial questions to help you uncover these facts without inflicting pressure or chasing away prospects. You will learn how to use the questioning process early and often to maintain a favorable sales atmosphere.

Once you master the winning sales techniques outlined in The Very Little but Very Powerful Book on Closing, you will be transformed into a salesperson that others envy. You will have the skills to beat the competition at every turn, win new accounts, retain valued clients and take your sales to the next level.

There are few industrialists in history who could match Elon Musk's relentless drive and ingenious vision. A modern alloy of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs, Musk is the man behind PayPal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, each of which has sent shock waves throughout American business and industry. More than any other executive today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as a science fiction fantasy.

In this lively, investigative account, veteran technology journalist Ashlee Vance offers an unprecedented look into the remarkable life and times of Silicon Valley's most audacious entrepreneur. Written with exclusive access to Musk, his family and his friends, the book traces his journey from his difficult upbringing in South Africa to his ascent to the pinnacle of the global business world. Vance spent more than 50 hours in conversation with Musk and interviewed close to 300 people to tell the tumultuous stories of Musk's world-changing companies and to paint a portrait of a complex man who has renewed American industry and sparked new levels of innovation -- all while making plenty of enemies along the way.

Sophia Amoruso spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft and scrounging in dumpsters for leftover bagels. By age 22 she had dropped out of school, and was broke, directionless and checking IDs in the lobby of an art school -- a job she'd taken for the health insurance. It was in that lobby that Sophia decided to start selling vintage clothes on eBay.

Flash forward ten years to today, and she's the founder and executive chairman of Nasty Gal, a $100-million-plus fashion retailer. Sophia was never a typical CEO, or a typical anything, and she's written #GIRLBOSS for other girls like her: outsiders (and insiders) seeking a unique path to success, even when that path is windy as all hell and lined with naysayers.

#GIRLBOSS proves that being successful isn't about where you went to college or how popular you were in high school. It's about trusting your instincts and following your gut; knowing which rules to follow and which to break; when to button up and when to let your freak flag fly.

The importance of money in our lives is readily apparent to everyone--rich, poor, and in between. However grudgingly, most of us accept the expression "Money makes the world go round" as a universal truth. We are all aware of the power of money--how it influences our moods, compels us to take risks, and serves as the yardstick of success in societies around the world. Yet because we take the daily reality of money so completely for granted, we seldom question how and why it has come to play such a central role in our lives.

In Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us, author Kabir Sehgal casts aside our workday assumptions about money and takes the reader on a global quest to uncover a deeper understanding of the relationship between money and humankind. More than a mere history of its subject, Coined probes the conceptual origins and evolution of money by examining it through the multiple lenses of disciplines as varied as biology, psychology, anthropology and theology. Coined is not only a profoundly informative discussion of the concept of money, but it is also an endlessly fascinating and entertaining take on the nature of humanity and the inner workings of the mind.

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly and then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment and training — but none of that seemed to matter.

General McChrystal led a hierarchical, highly disciplined machine of thousands of men and women. But to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, his Task Force would have to acquire the enemy’s speed and flexibility. Was there a way to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network? If so, could the same principles apply in civilian organizations?

In this powerful book, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be relevant to countless businesses, nonprofits and other organizations. The world is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for those in charge is to give small groups the freedom to experiment while driving everyone to share what they learn across the entire organization. As the authors argue through compelling examples, the team of teams strategy has worked everywhere from hospital emergency rooms to NASA. It has the potential to transform organizations large and small.

Grant Cardone had grown up with big dreams, but friends and family told him to be more reasonable and less demanding. If he played by the rules, they said, he could enjoy everyone else’s version of middle class success. But when he tried it their way, he hit rock bottom.

Then he tried the opposite approach. He said NO to the haters and naysayers and said YES to his burning, outrageous, animal obsession. He reclaimed his obsession with wanting to be a business rock star, a super salesperson, a huge philanthropist. He wanted to live in a mansion and even own an airplane.

Obsession made all of his wildest dreams come true. And it can help you achieve massive success too. As Cardone says, we're in the middle of an epidemic of average. The conventional wisdom is to seek balance and take it easy. But that has really just given us an excuse to be unexceptional.

Whether you are looking for gift ideas or you just want to borrow a great business book from your library, take a look at Toronto Public Library's newest business books.