The Best Leadership Books of 2017
The year 2017 has witnessed many highs and lows in terms of leadership and senior management across globe. Given the rate of change of technologies, policies and strategies, the leaders of today need to be on their feet to lead for tomorrow. We bring here a collation of the best books on leadership which can help you stay nimble, stay agile and stay on top as leaders.
- Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age by Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig
Smart technologies will become ubiquitous, invading and changing many aspects of our professional and personal lives and in many ways challenging our fundamental beliefs about success, opportunity, and the American Dream. New skills will be needed. Uniquely human skills. Those skills, while uniquely human, are not what we are typically trained to do and require a deal of messy personal development.
- Ego Free Leadership: Ending the Unconscious Habits that Hijack Your Business by Brandon Black and Shayne Hughes
“Anytime we know intellectually what to do, but our actual behavior is inconsistent or in contradiction, it is a sign we are being short-circuited by our egosystem. These behavioral derailers come in many forms: conflict avoidance, procrastination, defensiveness, people pleasing, shutting down, being argumentative, just to name a few.”
- Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
Radical candor is a culture of guidance based on caring personally and challenging directly everyone you work with. The goal is to achieve collaboratively what you could never achieve individually, and to do that, you need to care about the people you’re working with.
- Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times by Nancy Koehn
The crisis that can break one person can give birth to leadership in another. It’s a conscious choice to lead. Koehn brings out key lessons common to Ernest Shackleton, President Abraham Lincoln, legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Nazi-resisting clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and environmental crusader Rachel Carson, as they struggled with their thoughts in what were do or die situations.
- Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
- The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams by Sam Walker
The best leaders in sports history were not mesmerizing characters. They didn’t always make for great television. That’s what we’ve come to expect, however. So that’s what we continue to get. And so teams choose the wrong people to lead them. They promote people with the wrong characteristics. It’s typically not the player with the highest market value. What it takes to lead is not always what it seems.
- Open Source Leadership: Reinventing Management When There’s No More Business as Usual by Rajeev Peshawaria
Based on Peshawaria’s research spanning 28 countries, he concludes that traditional industrial age thinking needs a massive upgrade to successfully navigating the brave new world of business. Open Source Leadership rewrites the rules of management, giving you a unique look at the most common misperceptions, illusions, and downright wrong information you’ve been getting about what works and what doesn’t. It provides a new, counterintuitive model for seizing competitive edge in any industry.
- The Leadership Gap: What Gets Between You and Your Greatness by Lolly Daskal
The gap in our leadership arises as a result of the disconnect between how we think people are experiencing our leadership and how they are actually experiencing our leadership. And where we find that disconnect we limit or even derail our leadership potential.
- Conflict without Casualties: A Field Guide for Leading with Compassionate Accountability by Nate Regier
The misuse of conflict energy is the biggest crisis facing our world, and that we haven’t even begun to harness the creative potential of conflict. When people embrace the fullest meaning of compassion as a process of “struggling with” others in creative conflict, they can transform lives, companies, and the world.
- Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less – and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined by Scott Sonenshein
Scott Sonenshein dispels the notion that having more resources = getting better results and replaces it with the conviction that a better use of resources = getting better results. Especially in uncertain times, “stretching equips us with the abilities to adapt and change when facing a less predictable set of circumstances.”
- Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life by Tasha Eurich
Most people feel like they know themselves pretty well. But what if you could know yourself just a little bit better—and with this small improvement, get a big payoff…not just in your career, but in your life?
- High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way by Brendon Burchard
Based on one of the largest surveys ever conducted on high performers, it turns out that just six habits move the needle the most in helping you succeed. Adopt these six habits, and you win. Neglect them, and life is a never-ending struggle.
- One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams by Chris Fussell with C. W. Goodyear
In Team of Teams, retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal and former Navy SEAL Chris Fussell made the case for a new organizational model combining the agility, adaptability, and cohesion of a small team with the power and resources of a giant organization. Now, in One Mission, Fussell channels all his experiences, both military and corporate, into powerful strategies for unifying isolated and distrustful teams.
- Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.
- Finding My Virginity by Richard Branson
Richard Branson titled his autobiography Finding My Virginity because “You can only lose your virginity once. But in every aspect of my life—building businesses, raising a family, embarking upon adventures—I try to do things for the first time every day.” He shares his ups and downs in his entertaining, candid style. “If your life is one long success story it won’t make for a good read. What’s more, you’re most likely a liar. We all have ups and downs, trials and tribulations, failures and triumphs: we just hope to come out stronger on the other side.”
Now that you have read the list, which book are you going to pick up next?
