Stephen King says that if you want to be a writer, there are two things you must do: read a lot and write a lot. This is about the “read a lot” part. I include reading lists and book reviews that will help you do business more effectively and write better for business.
In this post, I point you to reviews of The Loyalist Team: How Trust, Candor and Authenticity Create Great Organizations, The New Leadership Literacies, Hit Refresh, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek, and Blue Ocean Shift.
From Skip Prichard: How to Create A Loyalist Team
“Their book, The Loyalist Team: How Trust, Candor and Authenticity Create Great Organizations, tackles the difficult subject of teams. Their work on creating high-performance teams has yielded expertise and results for all of us to learn from. I recently asked them to share some of their research.”
From Michael McKinney: 5 Leadership Literacies You Will Need in the Future
“FUTURIST Bob Johansen tells us in The New Leadership Literacies, that over the next ten years the world will become explosively more connected. Anything that can be distributed will. To help prepare leaders for the future, he offers a list of five new leadership literacies. He encourages us to expand on them, to draw our own insights and create actions to improve our leadership in the decade ahead.”
From Jena McGregor: 19 minutes with Microsoft’s CEO: A new book, a new culture and a ‘complete nonsense answer’
“Now he is an author with a book of his own. When Nadella’s book, ‘Hit Refresh,’ hits shelves this week, he’ll join the few sitting CEOs who’ve written their own books while still on the job. Even fewer have done so this early in their tenure: Nadella became only the third CEO of Microsoft in February 2014. Part memoir, part leadership guide, part futurist vision of technology, the new book describes how Nadella has been reinventing an aging tech giant into a more open, more collaborative culture focused on putting mobile and cloud computing first.”
From Wharton: Cereal Wars: The Bitter Feud Behind an Iconic Brand
“More than a century ago, Kellogg’s created the first breakfast cereal, the corn flake, in Battle Creek, Mich. Today, the name Kellogg’s evokes corn flakes as well as Pringles potato chips, Pop tarts, Eggo and other snack items. But the brand’s status as an American icon glosses over the family drama between brothers John and Will Kellogg, whose ideas gave birth to the business. The book, The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek, chronicles this conflict.”
From INSEAD: What It Takes to Shift From Competing to Creating
“In their just released book, BLUE OCEAN SHIFT, Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, creators of Blue Ocean Strategy, deliver the definitive guide to shifting yourself, your team and your organisation to new heights of confidence, market creation and growth. They show why nondisruptive creation is as important as disruption in seizing new growth, what leads to one over the other and why you’d be unwise not to understand this.”
Reading recommendations are a regular feature of this blog. Want more recommendations about what to read? Check out my Three Star Leadership blog and Michael McKinney’s LeadingBlog.