Here are 100 books that Sources of Power fans have personally recommended if you like
Sources of Power.
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I have for 28 years helped organizations around the world scale their business. I'm a dedicated innovator and thought leader in artificial intelligence and digital commerce. My passion for innovation thrives in exploring how AI can transform businesses and improve lives. I've authored 10 books and shared my insights as a professional speaker to educate, inspire, and motivate others. I love delving into the future of AI and innovation, which drives me to constantly learn and share knowledge. This list reflects the books that have significantly influenced my journey. My life is about pushing forward, always looking for alternatives to understand where those paths might lead us.
This book transformed my understanding of human cognition. I love how Daniel Kahneman delves into the dual systems that drive our thoughts—intuitive and deliberate.
This book helped me recognize cognitive biases and informed how I develop AI technologies that align with human behavior. It reinforced the importance of designing AI that complements our natural thinking patterns.
The phenomenal international bestseller - 2 million copies sold - that will change the way you make decisions
'A lifetime's worth of wisdom' Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics 'There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Thinking, Fast and Slow' Financial Times
Why is there more chance we'll believe something if it's in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast,…
I sometimes describe myself as a stealth Zen teacher working in the business world. I've founded and been CEO of three companies, including the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, a company I helped create and launch inside of Google's headquarters. I'm an executive coach and consultant to CEOs and leaders in the corporate and non-profit worlds. Prior to my business career I was a resident of the San Francisco Zen Center for 10 years. I'm the author of 5 books.
Though written more than 30 years ago, I continue to return to it for solid business, entrepreneurial, and life advice.
Peter Senge's theories can help businesses to clarify their goals, to better understand threats, and to recognize new opportunities. He introduces leaders and managers to a new source of competitive advantage, and offers an empowering approach to work.
Mastery of Senge's five disciplines enables managers to overcome their obstacles to growth and creates new futures for them and their companies. The five disciplines are drawn from science, spiritual wisdom, psychology, cutting-edge management thought, and Senge's own work with top corporations that employ his methods.
One of the seminal management books of the past 75 years, The Fifth Discipline is an international multi-million-copy bestseller. Written in an engaging and accessible way, with diagrams and illustrations, it will change the way you think and therefore way you and your team grows and develop. In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organisation's ability to learn faster than its competitors....
'Senge explains why the learning organization matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practicing it, and shows what it's like to operate under this system.…
I'm a bestselling business author, top-rated leadership speaker, and unconsultant who helps individuals and organizations think more critically, lead more effectively, and make better decisions. Prior to writing American Icon, I spent 20 years as a business reporter, covering the high-tech, biotech, and automotive industries for newspapers in California and Michigan. After that, I quit my job in order to help CEOs understand and implement the game-changing leadership I described in it. In 2017, I published my second book, Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything and started my own company, Red Team Thinking, to train organizations in this revolutionary approach to decision-making because I believe that who thinks wins.
The Logic of Failure explores why leaders make bad decisions – and how to make better ones. Whenever I am asked for a book recommendation, this is always the first one I mention because I have learned so much from it, and what I have learned has helped me make better decisions every single day. This is an amazing, evidence-based effort to understand the root causes of failure and the pathways to success. It will help you understand how your plans can fail so that you can ensure they succeed.
Why do we make mistakes? Are there certain errors common to failure, whether in a complex enterprise or daily life? In this truly indispensable book, Dietrich Doerner identifies what he calls the logic of failure",certain tendencies in our patterns of thought that, while appropriate to an older, simpler world, prove disastrous for the complex world we live in now. Working with imaginative and often hilarious computer simulations, he analyzes the roots of catastrophe, showing city planners in the very act of creating gridlock and disaster, or public health authorities setting the scene for starvation. The Logic of Failure is a…
I have devoted my career to helping leaders navigate challenging transitions into new roles, build their teams, and transform their organizations. Strategic thinking is a key foundation of my work as an executive coach and advisor at Genesis Advisers and a professor at the IMD Business School. Whether executives are taking new roles or driving large-scale transformations, they must be able to rapidly analyze the context, craft good visions and strategies, and mobilize people to realize them. I try to equip the leaders I work with with the mental frameworks, tools, and skillsets to adapt and succeed in the first 90 days and beyond.
This book helped me understand more about the causes of bad decisions and how to overcome them, which was important for the work I was doing on structured team problem-solving.
I especially liked the focus on framing problems well, which contributed to the recent Harvard Business Review article I wrote with a colleague on approaches to reframing problems. I also gained more insight into common decision traps and how to avoid them, which was helpful in my work with leaders taking on challenging new roles.
Just making a decision can be hard enough, but how do you begin to judge whether it's the right one? Chip and Dan Heath, authors of #1 New York Times best-seller Switch, show you how to overcome your brain's natural shortcomings.
In Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath draw on decades of psychological research to explain why we so often get it very badly wrong - why our supposedly rational brains are frequently tripped up by powerful biases and wishful thinking. At the same time they demonstrate how relatively easy it is to avoid the pitfalls and find the best answers,…
When I worked in clinical practice as a psychotherapist, I worked with many burnt-out clients and always found it frustrating that the conventional wisdom was to take time off or stop working, which is just not practical (or desirable) for many people. I was always looking for alternative things people could do to help themselves. Then I experienced burnout myself, and whilst it was dreadful, I learnt first hand how to put all of this into practice, hence my research on the topic. I now work with people and organisations in high pressured, innovative environments where the focus is on preventing burnout rather than recovering.
In organisations, culture can drive or protect people against burnout, and I love Amy’s work because she addresses a wide range of organisational issues through the topic of psychological safety.
I find the ideas and concrete strategies described in this book can flex to almost any type of business and she provides just enough science to convince the more academically minded whilst remaining practical and realistic.
Conquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent-but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of "fitting in" and "going along" spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought,…
I have been studying how leaders and their teams make complex decisions for the past 25 years. As a professor, I am passionate about teaching students and managers. My published work includes three books, as well as numerous best-selling management case studies. I have served on the faculty at Bryant University in Rhode Island for the past 16 years, and prior to that, I served on the faculty at Harvard Business School for 6 years.
I found Russo & Schoemaker’s book to be a useful, practical, step-by-step guide for refining the way I make decisions. They inspired me to think about why I make flawed choices at times, as well as why the teams on which I work might stumble as well. In my work, I’ve been able to then employ some of the techniques they describe for overcoming various decision-making biases and obstacles. As you read the book, you will find tips that you can use right away in your personal lives and professional work.
Business revolves around making decisions, often risky decisions, usually with incomplete information and too often in less time than we need. Executives at every level, in every industry, are confronted with information overload, less leeway for mistakes, and a business environment that changes rapidly. In light of this increased pressure and volatility, the old-fashioned ways of making decisions–depending on intuition, common sense, and specialized expertise–are simply no longer sufficient. Distilling over thirty years of groundbreaking research, Winning Decisions, written by two seasoned business advisers and world leaders in behavioral decision studies, is a comprehensive, one-of-a-kind guide to the proven methods…
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even…
I'm a bestselling business author, top-rated leadership speaker, and unconsultant who helps individuals and organizations think more critically, lead more effectively, and make better decisions. Prior to writing American Icon, I spent 20 years as a business reporter, covering the high-tech, biotech, and automotive industries for newspapers in California and Michigan. After that, I quit my job in order to help CEOs understand and implement the game-changing leadership I described in it. In 2017, I published my second book, Red Teaming: How Your Business Can Conquer the Competition by Challenging Everything and started my own company, Red Team Thinking, to train organizations in this revolutionary approach to decision-making because I believe that who thinks wins.
If you read one book on AI, make sure it is this one. Machine, Platform, Crowd cuts through the hype and science fiction that surrounds the artificial intelligence revolution to uncover the real opportunities created by this rapidly evolving technology. This book has shaped my own thinking about AI, which I now see as a force multiplier for human decision-makers, rather than as a replacement for them. It will help you better understand the challenges and opportunities this creates for you and your organization as well.
We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than those from corporate research laboratories.
Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd. The balance now favours the second element of the pair, with massive implications for how we run our companies and live our lives. McAfee and…
My passion for developing entrepreneurial and business instinct is simple. It is all based on confidence. Over time, my experiences have shown me that many leaders (myself included) can end up in “decision paralysis” and default to taking no action at all. Leaders can have all of the information and indicators that a decision is the right thing to do, but they default to doing nothing. By developing a better understanding of my own instincts, I have been able to build confidence in the decisions I have made over the past 20 years, thus eliminating any deterrents from making sound decisions.
Blink is a book about how you already know what you don’t know. Malcolm Gladwell breaks down how our instincts and “gut feeling” are always emotional reactions. Those instincts are based on past experiences and knowledge built over time. However, these instincts, whether they are acted upon or not, can be extremely valid even though we have trouble articulating it more than a “sixth sense.”
Explaining how these instincts are developed and (more importantly) learning how to break them down in a way to communicate them in a meaningful way is how many leaders develop emotional intelligence and business acumen.
Intuition is not some magical property that arises unbidden from the depths of our mind. It is a product of long hours and intelligent design, of meaningful work environments and particular rules and principles. This book shows us how we can hone our instinctive ability to know in an instant, helping us to bring out the best in our thinking and become better decision-makers in our homes, offices and in everyday life. Just as he did with his revolutionary theory of the tipping point, Gladwell reveals how the power of blink' could fundamentally transform our relationships, the way we consume,…
For as long I can remember, I’ve been an ideas guy. I even like the idea of ideas…I guess that makes me a meta-idea guy. But not just any ideas. Ideas that achieve the maximum impact with the minimum means. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I’d give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Creative ideas are the main event of the imagination, and the simpler the better. I've written and published several books, hundreds of articles and blogs, and even had dozens of songs published. But by far my favorite creative accomplishment is winning the New Yorker cartoon caption contest in 2008.
Roger Martin is a mentor. I learned how to think strategically from him, first-hand. In fact, I hated strategy until I met Roger. He is one of the brightest thinkers on the planet. I use his frameworks daily in my work. His concept of integrative thinking, taught while he was dean of the University of Toronto’s progressive Rotman School, is all about the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at once. This is the stuff of breakthrough. The challenge is to avoid either/or thinking when considering two different ideas and synthesize them into an altogether new concept that improves on both. It’s like alchemy for the mind.
If you want to be as successful as Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, or Michael Dell, read their autobiographical advice books, right? Wrong, says Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind. Though following best practice can help in some ways, it also poses a danger: By emulating what a great leader did in a particular situation, you'll likely be terribly disappointed with your own results. Why? Your situation is different. Instead of focusing on what exceptional leaders do, we need to understand and emulate how they think. Successful businesspeople engage in what Martin calls integrative thinking creatively resolving the tension in opposing…
I (Robert) am primarily interested in modern British history. During my postgraduate studies, I worked mainly with government papers that had just been declassified. Like many historians, I enjoy unraveling the mystery that archival research offers and shedding light on forgotten or unheard stories. Meanwhile, Peter, my co-author, is passionate about the intersection between national security and human rights. He developed this interest during his PhD research, which examined the institutionalization of torture during the Iraq War. This research relied heavily on documents released via freedom of information requests and leaks, both of which are relevant to our book on the Official Record.
Written by Mary Graham of the Harvard University-affiliated The Transparency Policy Project, this book explores how eight presidents stretching backward from Barack Obama to George Washington have dealt with the tensions inherent in government secrecy within a society that (at least in theory and often only for some) allows citizens to feed into the management of government affairs.
Graham illustrates that secrecy has been utilized as much to hide mistakes as it has been to protect national security, as well as exploring key moments in the history of secrecy in the US, such as the labyrinth inquiries that followed the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the Nixon administration.
How presidents use secrecy to protect the nation, foster diplomacy, and gain power
Ever since the nation's most important secret meeting-the Constitutional Convention-presidents have struggled to balance open, accountable government with necessary secrecy in military affairs and negotiations. For the first one hundred and twenty years, a culture of open government persisted, but new threats and technology have long since shattered the old bargains. Today, presidents neither protect vital information nor provide the open debate Americans expect.
Mary Graham tracks the rise in governmental secrecy that began with surveillance and loyalty programs during Woodrow Wilson's administration, explores how it developed…
