100 books like It's Your Ship

People get promoted because they are good at their jobs and have achieved excellent results. What they may not understand is that success in their new role will require something very different. Working harder at what made them successful is not the answer.

Marshall Goldsmith provides aspiring leaders with the keys to growing into an effective leader as they work their way up the corporate ladder. This book helped me at a critical point in my development as a leader to understand and address the things that were holding me back. 

I have given a copy of this book to many friends and colleagues when they have been promoted. If you feel stuck in your career, read this book.

This classic by Max De Pree (the former CEO of Herman Miller) looks at leadership as a kind of stewardship, stressing the importance of building relationships, initiating ideas, and creating a lasting value system within an organization. Rather than focusing on the “how” of corporate life, he stresses that leaders need to explain the “why.” He writes that the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality and the last is to say thank you. De Pree offers dozens of memorable leadership anecdotes that will have you wishing you’d worked for him at some point in your career! A wonderful gem of a book, it’s lessons will resonate with any leader who is trying to build a winning culture. 

The Extraordinary Leader is a remarkable combination of expert insight and extensive research. The authors analyzed more than 200,000 assessments describing 20,000 managers—by far the most expansive research ever conducted for a leadership book. This book will take you inside the process of becoming a successful leader, as the authors detail the various skills needed to earn the respect of the people you lead. This is a must read for aspiring and experienced leaders alike and is one of my go-to manuals on how to develop leaders. One of the few books I’ve read cover-to-cover more than once, I’m confident you’ll come away with data-driven insights that you can begin to implement in your leadership role.

As they move up, executives become more and more responsible for strategy and building the capacity of the organization. But one thing never changes: they are still responsible for making sure that strategic plans get implemented.

Their dilemma, given all the other responsibilities they take on, is how to manage execution without getting bogged down at too low a level of detail. Bossidy is a retired CEO and Charan is a well-respected consultant. They lay out a roadmap for ensuring implementation and simultaneously building organization capacity.

Learning how to deal with people effectively is often a challenge for those who are promoted by an organization into management roles, and especially those promoted from within the company. This is because conscientious people who get themselves promoted generally expect the same level of commitment from those who will report to them. However, people are complex creatures and life is never quite that simple.

An entertaining and informative book that anyone engaged in a management or leadership role would do well to read, I once used it as the basis of the management course I used to teach many years back. Within a few simple principles that may be somewhat counter-intuitive to many people, the authors outline the management style that really gets results.

In my quest (you can also call it a professional career), I’m drawn to complexity since we create software for complex problems. There are books on Complexity Science; however, they are very academic. This particular book gives practical advice to cope with complexity. It acknowledges the balance between the emotional and rational sides and why we must bring our full-self to any aspect of our life. The “don’t be emotional, this is work” proves to be a threat to our mental well-being and kills innovation in a company. In the book, the authors explore how to listen to our bodies in the face of complexity in an accessible way.

Perform from your strengths! There can hardly be a more effective success principle than this one.

The book is very tiny – you can read it in 1-2 hours. But it has had a profound impact on my life. After reading it, I decided to quit my job and focus 100% on business because I discovered that I didn’t need a corporate environment to reach success and I didn’t need a boss either.

Only after reading Druckers' “Perform from your strengths” principle I gave myself permission to do just that – and it changed things quickly for me.

Peter Drucker, the great 20th-century leadership thinker, called Frances “perhaps the finest leader I have ever known.” Although Frances led a non-profit for girls, the Girl Scouts USA, she influenced corporate giants along with public sector and military leaders around the world with her philosophy, her wisdom, and her clarity about mission and values. She was also a pioneer when it came to valuing diversity and living those values. She wrote many books, but My Life in Leadership is my favorite, telling the highly detailed story of how a young girl from Johnson PA developed into a force that would subtly influence how excellence in leadership is defined.

James Kerr, in his book Legacy reveals the simple secrets of success behind some of the world's elite business, sports, and military organizations. He explores ethical leadership, trust, and individual initiative and what drives the best teams to extraordinary results; a relentless focus on trust, ethical behavior, and leadership styles, excellence, a collective commitment to an 'uncommon cause,' a high degree of autonomy, with clear, candid and compelling communication, an emphasis on individual accountability, integrity, and genuine humility, underpinned by a climate in which 'leaders create leaders'.

The book is extremely insightful. It is about leadership, decision-making, and self-mastery. The lessons of this book can be perfectly applied to personal life and business environment.

Trust-based leadership — know thyself, keep to the truth. If you succumb to peer pressure and do things because others want you, you will be cut off. Be genuine, stay true to yourself, and be honest… show more.

I recommend this book because of its accessibility and tie to the new age theories of consciousness. This book has the depth to bring value to experts, yet is accessible to anyone who wants to be a better leader. The authors demonstrate that hard work is not enough, recognizing how we’ve been conditioned to survive instead of thrive. They tout the benefits of compassion, empathy, resilience, and authentic engagement and encourage readers to rewire their thinking to manifest real change. This book doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that real change isn’t easy. It requires intention, finding purpose, and practice. But the authors also give you the tools and empowerment to make change a reality.