100 books like Reinventing Organizations

Most businesses today are filled with untapped creative potential. The primary barrier? Bureaucracy.

Following in the footsteps of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, this book takes a more academic approach, offering CEOs and MBAs rigorous case studies and practical strategies for influencing culture and reducing bureaucratic bloat. Authors Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini—also a McKinsey alum—argue that to be more innovative and adaptable, organizations need a new DNA, free from rigid structures and outdated management practices.

If crowd-sourced strategy, decentralized decision-making, and collective profit-sharing sound like a dream, this book shows how companies of all sizes are succeeding with these methods, adopted by global manufacturers like a leading French tire company and a Chinese appliance giant. It offers a practical guide for anyone looking to reshape work, regardless of their place in the organizational hierarchy.

Meeting Tony Hsieh and encountering his pioneering business and life philosophy was so transformative that I upended my entire life and lived out of a suitcase for years to document his fascinating social experiment in Las Vegas and beyond.

Hsieh, the late CEO of Zappos, was a trailblazer in the business world, known for balancing profits, passion, and purpose. He was an early advocate for stakeholder capitalism, a concept that puts employees, customers, and communities on par with shareholders. In his #1 New York Times bestselling memoir, Hsieh shares the mental models and visionary, relational leadership that helped him become a multi-millionaire in his early 20s and near billionaire after Amazon acquired Zappos. His unique take on human systems design draws inspiration from unlikely sources, including rave culture and Zen principles.

Hsieh’s insights offer a blueprint for creating a company culture that empowers employees, satisfies customers, and benefits external stakeholders.… show more.

I don’t usually read science fiction, but this book completely changed my perspective. It was an eye-opening experience, vividly illustrating what the climate crisis could look like if we don’t take significant action now. I was hooked by how realistic the scenarios felt, even though the story is fiction.

I found myself thinking deeply about the potential consequences of inaction and how urgent it is to address the climate crisis. The fictional eyewitness accounts made it even more impactful, giving me a sense of immediacy and personal connection to the issue. I didn’t expect a science fiction novel to be so relevant to our current world, but this one is a must-read for everyone. 

When I first saw Brené Brown’s viral TED talk on vulnerability in the early 2010s, it challenged my understanding of the term and opened a whole new world for me, as it did for millions of others. At the time, I was a senior editor at Business Insider, and Brown’s work became a model that helped me navigate life inside a demanding, fast-paced media startup—and the complex human challenges of being a new manager. In Daring Greatly, she redefines vulnerability as a strength, upending traditional beliefs and reshaping how leadership is understood.

Brown argues that vulnerability is a critical skill for leaders in today’s evolving world of work, where workers crave authenticity, and emotional intelligence and empathy are more effective than outdated command-and-control methods—especially in increasingly dynamic organizations. Her research-backed tools have guided many on personal journeys to greater emotional freedom, just as they did for me.

Years later, I… show more.

The classic exposition of the idea that central governmental economic planning will inevitably be wasteful and tyrannical. Hayek today is caricatured by both right and left, but he is not the minimal state absolutist that both sides often take him to be. Hayek thinks that the way to attack poverty is not redistribution – there isn’t yet enough wealth in existence to give everyone a decent life – but the opportunities created by free markets. Another impetus for my own work was reading this book and discovering that I agreed with him much more than I had expected to. 

In a time when industrial policy is no longer taboo, even in the West, I would recommend this book to remember the pivotal role that state policies play in promoting development.

More than being the result of self-made people, crucial innovations like the smartphone result from the research backbone that the state provides.

The book is, therefore, thought-provoking as it debunks myths of state decline during the so-called neoliberal age, although recognises that private firms have acquired excessive power.

The authors of this book were stalwarts of The Economist for many years. They bring to this book all their considerable powers as writers and analysts of contemporary politics and economics. Again, this book was a major source of inspiration for my own book. After discussing prior revolutions in the scale and scope of the state over the last two centuries, The Fourth Revolution argues that: 1) reform of the state is essential, and 2) this reform is possible because it is already happening all over the world thanks to new technology. This book, therefore, served for me as the launching point for my own book which looks at a great number of these actual changes in governments around the world that are taking place on the back of new technologies and forms of organization. 

The author of this book, Aneesh Chopra, became the first chief technology officer of the United States government in 2009. Prior to that, he was the Secretary of Technology for Virginia and managing director for a health care think tank. As CTO for the US government, Chopra led the administration’s attempts to create a more open, tech-savvy government. In this book, he draws on his experience and interviews with policy experts and tech insiders to show how government can establish a new paradigm for the internet era, one that allows us to tackle the most challenging problems, from economic development to veteran affairs. Once again, it was a source of inspiration for me. My own book extends his discussion of the US federal government to the state and city level, as well as looks at many other countries around the world, both developed and developing.

Kate Rayworth speaks our language. This book explains how to develop an economy that takes human and planetary flourishing into account and, most importantly, explains how we might think differently to get there.

This is a 300-plus-page book about economics—to be honest, even we haven't finished it cover to cover—but we feel a little bit wiser and more hopeful every time we crack it open!

I am such a fan of Theory U, which gives the practical road map to ‘Presencing’ described in this book: the path it unfolds around generating truly transformational change, shifting our leadership and organisational thinking, decision-making, and action away from the traditional notions of leadership–evidence-driven thinking and problem-solving–and into the realms of heightened awareness, intuition, and sustainable decision making. 

In my view, this book offers a clever combination of perspectives and insights from the worlds of science, business, and, courageously, spirituality. Its integration of big-picture vision–the change we could bring to the world–grounded in reality with real-life case studies and practical exercises makes it a valuable guidebook for leaders.