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Best Get-Ahead Books for Alpha Females

Weve scoured the shelves for the best career guides, required reading for the woman eyeing the executive suite.

By Eileen Conlan

Aug 13, 2008

Sergey Baykov

Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office, by Lois P. Frankel

Adrian Wroth

The Power of Nice, by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval

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.

Skip ODonnell

The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss

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.

Lise Gagne

You Want Me to Work with Who?, by Julia Jansen

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.

Basic Black, by Cathie Black

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.

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