Looking for last-minute gift ideas for the businessman or woman in your life?

Or maybe you'll have some personal reading time over the holidays.

Here are some business book suggestions ... some old, some new, and all recommended by astute readers.

In my experience, the single most frequently referenced book, year after year by motivational speakers and business professors, is "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't" by Jim Collins.

Many say Mr. Collins, a former Stanford Graduate School of Business professor and now an independent management researcher, set the standard in 2001 for describing successful corporate leadership.

Since spring 2005, when New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman published "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," that's the book most often cited whenever talk turns to the connected, global economy that we live in today.

Those looking for marketing insight are giving kudos to Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, for "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More." It's about niche marketing ... to tinier and tinier niches.

If you're not sick of Enron and want to learn more about its sad collapse, check out "Conspiracy of Fools" by Kurt Eichenwald, an award-winning investigative reporter. I haven't read it, but some who have say it's thriller-like in the telling of the company's creation and demise.

Pierre Mornell, a psychiatrist specializing in human-resource development, is the author of "Hiring Smart: How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game" and, for the flip side of the job market, "Games Companies Play: The Job Hunter's Guide to Playing Smart and Winning Big in the High-Stakes Hiring Game."

Leigh Branham has human-resource industry attention with his employee retention work reflected in "Keeping the People Who Keep You in Business" and "The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave."

Several business leaders interviewed this year have found leadership words of wisdom in "The Education of a Coach" by David Halberstam. It's about Bill Belichik, the Super Bowl-winning head coach of the New England Patriots.

On several "best books" lists recently I note that Harvard Business School professor and author Rosabeth Moss Kanter is urging attention to "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli. It's a 15th-century look at the dark side of power that still holds lessons today.

Two books that continued to build a fan base from last year: "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by The New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, and "Freakonomics" by University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner.

The former is about snap judgments, first impressions and other things that happen in the blink of an eye. In the latter, Mr. Levitt applies economic theory to things that happen in everyday life. And, yes, it's readable.