Skip to main content

Best Leadership Books To Read In 2015


As you think about what business books you want to read next year, how about adding to the list at least one book from the list below. Perhaps a book that will help you improve your leadership skills.

A couple years ago, members of five groups on the professional social media web site LinkedIn voluntarily recommended their favorite books about leadership. They responded to a group discussion question, "Best Leadership Books -- What's Your Favorite?"

When contemplating their favorites, they likely thought about which books were in their minds the best, most favored, most inspiring, most instructional, most relevant, and which ones they might reference frequently.

The recommendations came from these member groups:
  • ExecuNet Executive Suite
  • Leadership Think Tank
  • Linked 2 Leadership
  • Keller Graduate School Of Management
  • The Talent Buzz
As the recommendations rolled in, it became clear that leaders learn from, and are inspired by, a wide variety of books -- biographies, autobiographies, books backed by research and academia, books made famous by the popular press, books by motivational speakers, and books by professionals eager to share their personal and professional leadership success stories, tips and suggestions.

Readers' favorites included those written by or about sports coaches, athletes, CEOs, scholars, religious leaders, governmental and military leaders.

Not surprisingly, many well-known leadership book authors made the list, such as authors:
  • Drucker
  • Kotter
  • Maxwell
  • Welch
Interestingly, the discussion thread, particularly within the Linked 2 Leadership group of LinkedIn, generated debate about the value and quality of some of the book recommendations. But, the general consensus was that if someone recommended a book that inspired them or taught them how to be a better leader, the book was worth their time.

Here is the list of all 235 books, in alphabetical order. It represents many of the vast approaches to leadership in practice today throughout the world. Take a look to see how many you've read. Perhaps you'll find one of your favorites.  Because the list is a couple years old, it doesn't include some of the latest best leadership books.  Even so, these classics listed below remain relevant today.

And, on December 1 coming up, I'll post my selection for the best new book about leadership in 2014.



Top Books About Leadership.
  • 1776
  • 177 Mental Toughness Secrets Of The World Class
  • 100 Greatest Ideas For Effective Leadership And Management
  • 100 Greatest Leadership Principles Of All Time
  • 20 Minutes To A Top Performer
  • A Book Of Five Rings
  • A Commitment To Valor
  • A Force For Change: How Leadership Differs From Management
  • A Leader In The Making
  • A Sense Of Urgency
  • A Whole New Mind
  • Against The Gods
  • Alexander The Great
  • Awaken The Giant Within
  • Awesomely Simple
  • Bad Leadership
  • Becoming A Person Of Influence
  • Becoming A Resonant Leader
  • Best Practices In Leadership Development & Organization Change
  • Beyond The Timberline
  • Bo's Lasting Lessons
  • Built To Last
  • Built To Serve
  • Changing The Human Battery
  • Chasing The Rabbit
  • Choices: Discover Your 100 Most Important Life Choices
  • Cracking The Code Of Leadership
  • Credibility
  • Crucial Conversations: Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High
  • Deep Change
  • Defeat Into Victory
  • Developing The Leader Within You
  • Defining Moments
  • Developing The Leaders Around You
  • Discipline Of Market Leaders
  • Effective Supervisory Management
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Energy Leadership
  • Engaged Leadership
  • Evolutionary Leadership
  • Execution: The Discipline Of Getting Things Done
  • Executive Wisdom
  • Exodus
  • Exposing Leadership: Redefining The Top 20 Leadership Traits
  • Fired Up Or Burned Out
  • Firms Of Endearment
  • First Break All The Rules
  • For Your Improvement
  • Force For Change
  • From Worst To First
  • Gates Of Fire
  • Get Out Of Your Own Way
  • Good To Great
  • Gung Ho
  • Handbook Of Leadership
  • Heroic Leadership
  • High Five: The Magic Of Working Together
  • Holy Bible
  • Hostage At The Table
  • How Did That Happen?
  • How Lance Does It
  • How The Mighty Fall
  • How To Get Anyone To Do Anything
  • How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be
  • How To Grow Leaders
  • How To Lead
  • How To Think Like A CEO & Act Like A Leader
  • How To Win Friends And Influence People
  • In Search Of Excellence
  • Influencer: The Power To Change Anything
  • Inside The Tornado
  • Inspirational Leadership
  • Integrity: The Courage To Meet The Demands Of Reality
  • Integrity Is Everything
  • Irresistible Leadership
  • It's Our Ship
  • It's Your Ship
  • Jesus, CEO
  • Launching A Leadership Revolution
  • Lead To Succeed
  • Leaders: Strategies For Taking Charge
  • Leadership
  • Leadership: Tidbits & Treasures
  • Leadership: Enhancing The Lessons Of Experience
  • Leadership Agility
  • Leadership And Motivation
  • Leadership And The One Minute Manager
  • Leadership And The New Science
  • Leadership And Self-Deception
  • Leadership Brand
  • Leadership Engine
  • Leadership For The Disillusioned
  • Leadership God
  • Leadership Insights
  • Leadership Is An Art
  • Leadership Is Common Sense
  • Leadership Jazz
  • Leadership On The Line
  • Leadership Pipeline
  • Leadership Secrets Of Attila The Hun
  • Leadership Self-Deception: Getting Out Of The Box
  • Leadership Without Easy Answers
  • Leading At A Higher Level
  • Leading Change
  • Leading Leaders
  • Leading Out Loud
  • Leading With Confidence
  • Leading With Kindness
  • Learning From The Links
  • Led To Follow
  • Lessons On Leadership
  • Life Entrepreneurs
  • Lincoln On Leadership
  • Love Leadership
  • Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
  • Masters And Commanders
  • Masterplanning
  • Maximum Achievement
  • Maxwell Leadership Bible
  • Moments Of Truth
  • Monday Morning Leadership
  • Peak
  • Pivot: How One Simple Change In Attitude Can Lead To Success
  • On Becoming A Leader
  • On Leadership
  • One Thing You Need To Know
  • Only The Paranoid Survive
  • Out Of The Crisis
  • Predictably Irrational
  • Preparing For Leadership
  • Primal Leadership
  • Profiles In Leadership From The Battlefields Of Virginia
  • Real Leaders Don't Do PowerPoint
  • Reclaiming Higher Ground
  • Reframing Organizations
  • Regan On Leadership
  • Resonant Leadership
  • Results-Based Leadership
  • Scuttle Your Ships Before Advancing
  • Scores On The Board
  • Senior Leadership Teams
  • Servant Leadership
  • Silver Parachutes
  • Situational Leadership
  • Son Of Morning Star
  • Start With Why
  • Stewardship
  • Straight From The Gut
  • Strengths-Based Leadership
  • Studying Leadership
  • Survival Is Not Enough
  • Team Of Rivals
  • The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness To Greatness
  • The 80/20 Principle
  • The 48 Laws Of Power
  • The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People
  • The 21 Irrefutable Laws Of Leadership
  • The 360 Degree Leader
  • The 33 Strategies Of War
  • The Adventure Of Leadership
  • The Anatomy Of Peace
  • The Arc Of Ambition
  • The Art And Discipline Of Strategic Leadership
  • The Art Of Possibility
  • The Art Of The Leader
  • The Art Of War
  • The Change Monster
  • The Courage To Teach
  • The Disney Way
  • The DNA Of Success
  • The Effective Executive
  • The Empowered Manager
  • The Essential HR Handbook
  • The Essential Wooden
  • The Extraordinary Leader
  • The Feiner Points Of Leadership
  • The Fifth Discipline
  • The First 90 Days
  • The Five Dysfunctions of A Team
  • The Four Obsessions Of An Extraordinary Executive
  • The Great Game Of Business
  • The Human Element
  • The Inspiring Leader
  • The Leader Of The Future
  • The Leader's Window
  • The Leadership Challenge
  • The Leadership Code: Five Rules To Live By
  • The Leadership Engine
  • The Leadership Matrix
  • The Leadership Moment
  • The Leadership Pill
  • The Leadership Secrets Of Colin Powell
  • The Leadership Test (my (Eric Jacobson's) favorite)
  • The Magic Of Thinking Big
  • The Maxwell Daily Reader
  • The Mission, The Men And Me
  • The New Leaders
  • The One Minute Manager
  • The Persian Expedition
  • The Practice Of Adaptive Leadership
  • The Practice Of Leadership
  • The Prince
  • The Psychology of Persuasion
  • The Pursuit Of Something Better
  • The Right To Lead
  • The Rules Of Management
  • The Score Takes Care Of Itself
  • The Secret Language Of Business
  • The Secret Language Of Leadership
  • The Servant
  • The Servant-Leader Within
  • The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave
  • The Sustainable Way
  • The Tao Of Leadership
  • The Winner Within: A Life Plan For Team Players
  • The World's Most Powerful Leadership Principle
  • The Wrong Bottom Line & How To Change It
  • Think & Grow Rich
  • Three Laws Of Performance
  • Total Leadership
  • Tough Choices
  • Toy Box Leadership
  • Tribes
  • Walk The Walk: The #1 Rule For Real Leaders
  • We Were Soldiers Once And Young
  • What A Great Idea
  • What Got You Here Won't Get You There
  • What Leaders Really Do
  • What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School
  • Why Not The Best
  • Who Says Elephants Can't Dance
  • Winning
  • Winning With People
  • Wooden
  • Words That Sell
  • You Don't Need A Title To Be A Leader

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coach Campbell's Leadership Principles And Winning Approach

Trillion Dollar Coach  is about  Bill Campbell , someone you likely never heard of, who coached several of the biggest names in Silicon Valley during a 16-year tenure, and who’s behind-the-scene wisdom helped created over a trillion dollars in market value. Authored by  Eric Schmidt ,  Jonathan Rosenberg , and  Alan Eagle , they share that from Steve Jobs and Dick Costolo to Larry Page and Sundar Pichai, these big names in Silicon Valley give credit to Campbell for much of their success. Campbell, who died in 2016, started his career as a football coach at Boston College and Columbia then switched to business in 1979. As leaders at Google for more than a decade, Schmidt, Rosenberg, and Eagle had the benefit of experiencing Campbell’s executive coaching firsthand. In addition, for the book, the authors interviewed over 80 people with whom Campbell also worked. Through stories from those interviews, Trillion Dollar Coach features specific strategies and action ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

Business And Life Lessons From Entrepreneur Miguel Leal

What I like most about Miguel Leal ’s memoir, aside from its overall compelling and inspiring information, are the business and life lessons he shares.  Those lessons are found throughout his recently released memoir, The House That Cheese Built . The book is a quintessential American dream story from a Mexican entrepreneur who shares the tale of building a multi-million-dollar business from scratch, complete with both success and failure, and always a vision of hope.  Leal came to the U.S. penniless as a teenager, speaking almost no English; he literally slept in the boiler room of a Wisconsin cheese factory for months before he was caught. Through hard work, grit, and ingenuity Leal would go on to launch his own business. He is widely credited with introducing Mexican cheeses to the U.S. market and grew his company to a multimillion-dollar success story that defined an industry. Yet, like many successful entrepreneurs, Leal’s great successes were matched by a variety of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Phoenix Encounter Method For Leaders

“All businesses sooner or later face the need to reconstruct their future,” explain the authors of the new book, The Phoenix Encounter Method . “They will need to destroy part or all of the incumbent business model in order to build their breakthrough, future-ready organization.” Therefore, this book shares a new method of leadership thinking – the Phoenix Encounter – relevant to all organizations in today’s ever-changing environment. Readers will learn how to proactively bridge the gap between perceiving a threat and doing something about it. Written by three INSEAD professors ( Ian C. Woodward , V. “Paddy” Padmanabhan , Sameer Hasija ) and Rum Charan , you’ll learn the steps needed to create a wider range of options to: Defend your organization Fortify its core business Build specific renewal initiatives The steps are grounded in transformation that includes these three elements : The Phoenix Attitude : a set of mindsets, habits, and behaviors that allows a leader to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Find Your Balance Point

A few years ago,  Brian Tracy , along with  Christina Stein , published,  Find Your Balance Point . "The desire for peace of mind and the idea of living a balanced life are central to your happiness and well-being. When you start to live your life in balance with the very best person you could possibly be, you will enjoy the happiness you deserve and experience harmony among all the elements that make up a successful life for you, as you define it," explain the authors. The book teaches you  how to identify you balance point, move to it at will, and automatically return to it whenever you want . "You need to establish your balance point before you can set and achieve the goals that are important to you," explains Tracy. The starting point is to develop absolute clarity about who you are and what matters to you. This means you much be clear about your  values . Then, chapter by chapter, Tracy and Stein take you through: Creating your vision and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Five Critical Roles You Need To Build A Winning Team

  The new book, Team Players , by leadership expert and New York Times bestselling author, Mark Murphy , explains why a team needs more than strong leaders—it needs the right mix of five roles and talents to succeed.   In addition, Murphy reveals that the secret to extraordinary teams isn’t making everyone the same—it’s embracing and leveraging fundamental differences through those five distinct team roles. No amount of teambuilding, trust, or cohesion can overcome having the wrong mix of people in the room.   The five essential roles and talents are:   The Director assumes a leadership role within the team, guiding its direction and making important, difficult, and even unpopular decisions.   The Achiever immerses themselves in the details of accomplishing tasks and getting things done, with a keen eye for delivering error-free work.   The Stabilizer keeps the team on track with meticulous planning, processes and procedures, clear timelines, and organi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The 10 Essential Elements Of Dignity

In their book, Millennials Who Manage , authors Chip Espinoza and Joel Schwarzbart , quote Donna Hicks 's explanation about how dignity is different from respect . Dignity is different from respect in that it is not based on how people perform, what they can do for us, or their likability. Dignity is a feeling of inherent value and worth. Therefore, Espinoza and Schwarzbart recommend that leaders treat those they are leading with dignity and follow Hick's 10 Essential Elements of Dignity : Acceptance of Identity - Approach people as being neither inferior nor superior to you. Assume that others have integrity. Inclusion - Make others feel that they belong, whatever the relationship. Safety - Put people at ease at two levels: physically, so they feel safe from bodily harm, and psychologically, so they feel safe from being humiliated. Acknowledgment - Give people your full attention by listening, hearing, validating, and responding to their concerns, feelin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leader's Playbook For Perpetual Innovation

  For over twenty years, Dr. Behnam Tabrizi has taught organizational transformation at Stanford University in its Executive Program, which he also directs. And now he’s written, Going on Offense: A Leader’s Playbook for Perpetual Innovation .  In a seven-year study, Tabrizi found that companies that focus their energy on building a supportive, purpose-driven culture that keeps people on edge, and boldly adapts to new environments are the companies that truly excel.  “Most companies pray for one innovation to skyrocket their growth. But the secret to success for the most innovative and agile companies is not just one good idea, rather a dedication to perpetual innovation and relentless experimentation that pulses through an organization, top to bottom,” explains Tabrizi.  His new book provides an insider view into the drivers of success and challenges in 26 organizations—including industry giants like Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft, and Starbucks—along with a...
Post a Comment
Read more

How To Conduct A Successful Post-Merger Integration

  Most business leaders think that mergers fail because of bad strategy or overpaying. But according to former senior partner at McKinsey and Harvard Business School’s David Fubini , that’s not where deals break down. They fail in what comes during and after integration.   More specifically, “Integration is what makes or breaks the success of a deal. Not design, not financing, not due diligence, not negotiations of structure,” says Fubini. “Because no matter how expertly you manage these elements, if you can’t bring all the pieces together, all your efforts might as well have been an academic exercise."   Fortunately, in his new book, Post-Merger Integration: Building The Mindset, Skills, And Discipline Needed For Deal Success , Fubini (along with Patrick Sanguineti ) offers a behind-the-scenes look at how deals actually succeed and where they go wrong. And he shows leaders how to develop an Integration Mindset that will enable you to navigate the complex, nuanced reality...
Post a Comment
Read more

10 Disciplines To Help You Stay Sharp And Energetic

The new book, Shine , is a transformative guide that illustrates how looking inward is the key to unlocking true entrepreneurial freedom. Certainly, Shine is a book for entrepreneurs, however, it is bound to benefit any business leader.   “Entrepreneurs often have a burning need to succeed. But that same relentless brilliance that propels you in your career can take a toll on your teams, personal relationships, and even your health,” explain author Gino Wickman and coauthor Rob Dube . “Our book will help you strike a crucial balance between those inner and outer worlds while taking your success to new heights.” In  Shine , Gino shares 10 disciplines to help you stay sharp and energetic without burning out. The 10 Disciplines teach you how they can lay a foundation that creates space in your busy life for you to consistently and optimally perform and achieve your inner peace.   “I have helped tens of thousands of entrepreneurs achieve significant business succ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Find The Truth In The Middle

If you're a parent of two children you already know that when the two are fighting and child #1 tells you what happened, you then ask child #2 what happened, and most often  the truth is somewhere in the middle  of what the two children have told you. Surprisingly, many managers, even when they are parents, don't use this parenting "discovery" skill in the workplace. Instead, they often listen to only one side of a situation. Whether it is because of lack of interest or lack of time, they don't proactively seek out the other side of the story. The unfortunate result is those managers form incorrect perceptions that can often lead to poor decisions and/or directives. So, the next time two employees are at odds, or when one department complains about another department within your organization,  take the time to listen to all sides of the situation to discover the truth that's in the middle .
Post a Comment
Read more