100 books like The End of Average

As a budding professional I was told not to be so kind to others, so I wasn’t taken advantage of.

Changing who I was and wanted to be didn’t seem like the right recipe for my success. Grant’s debut book has likely had the most impact on how I show up in my career and in life – that being a giver can be the key to our success and fulfillment. A must read for anyone who wants to do well while doing good.

Hit Refresh is such a fascinating tale – its Satya Nadella’s life story – his childhood in India, immigrating to the U.S. and the life lessons learned to lead along the way.

He succinctly and candidly tells the inside story of how a company rediscovered its soul and transformed itself. 

My favorite part is how Nadella describes his role at the helm of Microsoft: The C in CEO for Nadella stood for culture. He liked to believe the CEO is the curator of an organization’s culture.

"Anything is possible for a company when its culture is about listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents to the company’s mission. Creating that kind of culture is my chief job as CEO. The culture change I wanted was centred on delivering a growth mindset, to be customer-obsessed, diverse, and inclusive, and working as One Microsoft to get us there."

He devoted much… show more.

Trillion Dollar Coach is an absolutely brilliant read about a legendary coach and business executive who coached some of the best and brightest leaders in Silicon Valley.

Campbell coached, among others, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Sundar Pichai at Google, Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.

Much like my own rather strong beliefs on this topic, Bill preached that to be a great manager, you have to be a great coach.

Success as a leader was about taking others along on the journey. The higher you climb in the corporate world, the more your success will depend on making other people successful. That is the hallmark of a good leadership coach.

The book is full of examples, life lessons, anecdotes, and practical tips on how leaders can become better coaches.

Prof Useem, who teaches leadership at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, sent me a signed copy of this book through my spouse (a Wharton alum) and I cannot recommend it enough.

He eloquently equates a leader’s job to standing on the cliff edge, getting a grip on unfamiliar landscapes, and acquiring the skills to lead organizations in this constantly evolving, ever-changing business landscape.

I think this book is more relevant than ever given our turbulent times – Prof Useem draws on the experiences of ten bold CEOS to show us how, in a world characterized by unprecedented challenges of global pandemic and economic disruption, leaders need to find the edge for leaping across and breaking new ground on the other side.

An engaging and practical guide to being the ambidextrous leader who constantly propels the organization forward, without letting go of its core.

We are primed to measure things against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how closely we come to it or how far we deviate from it. It affects our own self-confidence, how we view and grade our performance and worth.

The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average--like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings--reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong. 

Together with great stories about the folly of averages (the one about pilot chairs really got me) and many research facts and stats it conveys a very important message about how we view the world.

The vibe is: foreboding folklore with a comforting twist!

The Wolf Suit wends through a dark wood, illustrated in a stark folk-art style that is in turns haunting and verdant. The story takes its time, building a deeply delicious atmosphere of suspense before revealing a completely unexpected ending that turns a fearful forest into a much friendlier place.

Keep a bowl of blackberries handy (and maybe a blanket to clutch), and relish the page turns! While The Wolf Suit is long in pages, the text is concise and flavorful, making this book a conquerable challenge for young readers!

A controversial play because of its end. Nora Helmer is the main character, a Norwegian married woman, wife of a bank manager, and a mother of three. Her life elapses day after day without opportunities for self-fulfillment in the last decades of the 19th century. I can’t say this female character is a feminist for its time, because she lives in a world full of laws made by men; so, in this sense she is like a doll, a superficial and wasteful person, and she changes slowly from act to act; she feels empty, she contemplates killing herself and at the end of the play Nora leaves her husband and family trying to escape from a stifling male-dominated society. Although this play was not intended written as a feminist, it has a great historical value in this field. If after reading you try to imagine what kind of life… show more.

This contemporary, quirky tale centers around the life of Keiko, a young woman who has never done anything in a conventional way and has her mother very worried that her daughter will never find a man and settle down into a conventional life. No, Keiko’s ways of thinking are startling and odd in ways that are both amusing and somewhat horrifying, as she really does fall outside the realm of conventional thinking and socially rewarded behavior. The reader comes to love her as she grows into womanhood (and personhood) as a worker in a fast-paced convenience store, where she memorizes hundreds of products and practices behaving more “normally” by mimicking the actions and words of her co-workers. Then a man named Shiraha enters the picture, for a new twist.

Sam the Man wants a job. His next-door neighbor will pay him a whole dollar each time he can convince her dad, Mr. Stockfish, to join him for a daily walk. But getting Mr. Stockfish to leave the living room isn’t easy. So when another neighbor asks if Sam would like to watch her chickens, he jumps at the chance. Chicken-sitting is way more fun than he expects, and soon Sam the Man is watching a chicken of his very own. The story is satisfying and funny and readers will want to learn all about Sam’s adventures in the rest of the series. Sam’s creative problem-solving skills had me laughing out loud.

I loved being challenged with the idea that there is something beyond resilience, that strength can be redefined as antifragility, and the application of this concept is infinite. Often shocked and kept off balance by the unorthodox words he created and paired, the uncertainty as he jumped from ancient Greece to the 21st century in one paragraph, I was forced as a reader to analyze old ideas through a novel lens.

I admit I feel a little smarter and less fragile, but I am still a novice as a flâneur. I agree with “I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time,” though I don’t pretend to understand everything Taleb means by this. Thankfully, he left a glossary of all his innovative words.