Book recommendations for business leaders: 5/23/19

May 23, 2019 | Reading Lists

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 Unstoppable Teams: The Four Essential Actions of High-Performance Leadership, Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, and Leadership at Scale: Better leadership, better results.

From Bob Morris: Unstoppable Teams

“As Alden Mills would be among the first to point out, some teams are unstoppable; most aren’t. Based what he has learned from wide and deep prior experience during more than thirty years with high-performance teams, he has identified four ‘essential actions’ — connect, achieve, respect, and empower — that, taken together, lie at the heart of every great team. I call it the CARE loop.”

From Michael McKinney: Cascades: 6 Principles for Creating Transformational Change

“In Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change, Greg Satell reveals how to start and sustain large-scale change and harness the power of cascades—small groups that are loosely connected but united by a common purpose. It is an insightful book with engaging examples of what has worked and what hasn’t.”

From Mark Gimein: Machine learned

“In his new book, Globotics Upheaval, economist Richard Baldwin wrestles with the opportunities and perils brought about by globalization and robotics,”

From Wharton: What Really Helps Employees to Improve (It’s not Criticism)

“In Nine Lies About Work, Buckingham and his co-author write about some of the larger issues behind what they see as necessary shifts in HR thinking. “The world of work today is overflowing with systems, processes, tools and assumptions that are deeply flawed and that push directly against our ability to express what is unique about each of us in the work we do every day.” They state that in studies of global worker engagement, less than 20% of workers report being fully engaged at work. Moreover, they write, we have been experiencing a global decline in productivity since the mid-1970s.”

From Adi Gaskell: How You Can Achieve Leadership At Scale

“In their latest book, Leadership at Scale, McKinsey consultants Claudio Feser, Michael Rennie and Nicolai Chen Nielsen modestly refer to the firm as the premier leadership factory in the world. Whilst confidence is clearly not something lacking at the company, it is nonetheless futile to deny their tremendous influence on the leadership profession today.”

Check out my review of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, And Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

Reading recommendations are a regular feature of this blog. Want more recommendations about what to read? Check out my Three Star Leadership blog, Michael McKinney’s LeadingBlog, and Skip Prichard’s Leadership Insights.