📚 I’ve had an incredible year learning from some of the most thoughtful leaders through their books, and wanted to share the five that most shaped me personally and professionally.
1. The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham.
📖 Read if you… want to stay relentlessly customer-focused and make better decisions as you scale.
Funny title. Brilliant book. He is so good on and customer obsession: “Instead of falling in love with our products, we’d be more successful if we fell in love with our customers and their outcomes”; and disciplined thinking: “the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your results.”
2. The Heart of Business by Hubert Joly
📖 Read if you… are leading a turnaround or want to better use trust as a key driver to performance.
For Joly, the heart of business is human connection. His stories from the BestBuy turnaround (“Renew Blue”) show how authenticity, vulnerability – “be yourself, your true self, your whole self” – and listening to those closest to the problem drive real transformation. “Decisions should be made by the people with the most information.”
3. How Leaders Learn by David Novak
đź“– Read if you.. want to turn your learning into strong execution.
Novak is outstanding on building joy, trust, and momentum through authenticity. “Work at being comfortable in your own skin.” My favorite line in the book: “Another strategy for doing hard things is just to do them. Motivation often grows out of action.”
4. BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship) by Jim Collins & Bill Lazier
đź“– Read if you.. want to build an enduring organization.
Powerful discussions on decision-making (“do not make a decision unless you have disagreement”), culture (“you’ve got to be a role model for the culture you want to create”), scaling with purpose (refer to vision “constantly”), and communication, (“If you’re going to err, err on the side of too much communication. You can’t over-invest in it.)
5. The Journey of Leadership by Maor, Strovink, Kaas & Srinivasan
📖 Read if you… want to lead with more self-awareness.
The big idea: lead as your authentic self by “taking the journey inward before you take the journey outward.” Key lessons: be constantly curious; don’t take yourself too seriously; harvest valuable lessons from your missteps; the way you deal with uncertainty is “learn, learn, learn”; energy is more important than time; human centric-leadership gives people purpose; take the long view; vulnerability is power.
The thread across all of these books: lead as yourself. Bring your perspective, mistakes, ideas, humility, and heart, and commit to continual growth so you can be worthy of the people and organizations you serve. ❤️