Best Get-Ahead Books for Alpha Females

The bottom line: If you've been called the dreaded "B" word, or your staff cowers when you walk by, consider this book a refresher course in the basics. It pays to be nice. It can sweeten a deal, invite networking opportunities, and foster loyalty among your underlings. Plus, "nice" companies boast lower turnover and higher productivity.

The bottom line: For career burnouts whose idea of a vacation requires a dead BlackBerry battery, this book reads like a Tony Robbins seminar. Halfway through you'll feel bold enough to quit your routine job and pursue your passion.

The bottom line: Most offices are a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club — the requisite grouch, loner, and overachiever among them. Jansen offers useful tips on how to get disparate office personalities to collaborate for best results.

The bottom line: In this quasi-memoir and self-help manual, the Hearst Magazines publisher details her ascent in publishing's formerly all-male ranks, punctuating her anecdotes with pivotal rules and lessons that guided her to the top. Most impressive is her candor about the mistakes along the way — like her disastrous stint as publisher of Francis Ford Coppola's ill-fated magazine, Zoetrope. Sharp, witty, and direct, this is the classic how-to for hard-core ladder-climbers.