5 Leadership Books to Sharpen Your Leadership Skills

If you are a new manager, want to be a manager, or just want to deal with people "better" this is the book for you. Julis is no "management guru" there are no rules or laws, this is just simple, straight forward advice based on her experiences at Instagram / facebook. One of the things I like is her honesty, she does not make out she is some management superhero. We all make mistakes, right? She shares with you her mistakes and what she learned. I'm already implementing a number of her recommendations and suggestions.

In this book Brene, gets you to look inside ourselves as leaders, until we understand ourselves, how can we start to understand others? She talks about vulnerability, courage, shame and empathy and how as leaders we need to live with our strengths and weaknesses. None of us are perfect and we have to learn to work with these imperfections and continually learn as we undertake this journey called leadership. 

When I set about reading “Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell, I had expected a book similar to “What Do You Say After You Say Hello” by Eric Berne. I even have a chapter on talking to strangers in my first book “Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers”.

Instead Malcolm takes us through a number of case studies where people have trusted strangers, mainly because we always want to see the best in people. Or where people have defied lie detector tests. All good examples, but I must place a word of warning.

Malcolm takes you to a very dark place, I had to put the book down a few times and catch my breath. If you are offended by anything of a sexual nature, this book isn’t for you. That said, sometimes you need to be taken out of your favourite place on the sofa and read something that’s uncomfortable.

There is nothing wrong in seeing the good side in people, but we shouldn’t always let our guard down and we should still retain the right to question and challenge. 

The book Trillion Dollar Coach, is about Bill Campbell who coached many of Silicon Valleys great, people like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt. The authors, have written this based on memory, emails and interviews to detail Bill’s attitude to coaching, management and behaviour. Just be aware that Bill only worked with Silicon Valley large companies, so the techniques they discuss in the book are “high level” (which is fine to set a strategy and culture) but also are about managing multiple teams. This isn’t a book, where you will learn one-to-one techniques.

Overall the book is nicely written, and the authors do create an atmosphere of warmth for Bill who sadly is no longer with us, but with this book his coaching vision lives on. 

The Infinite Game is an excellent book, I liked it so much that I purchased another one for my co-founder, Adam Gray. If you are in Leadership, Marketing or sales it is certainly a book to read.

The book describes the difference between Finite and Infinite mindsets (different from growth and fixed mindsets) and provides a framework for companies to recognise which mindset they have and how to implement an Infinite Mindset.

In Finite games, the rules are fixed and the end point is clear. “We are going to be a market leader or we are going to change the world”.

In Infinite games, the players come and go, the rules are changeable and there is no defined endpoint. People with an infinite mindset build stronger, more inventive, more inspiring organisations.

If you are in any role in leadership, culture creation, vision creating or marketing in either the start-up or in fact a business of any size, you should read this book.

Don't forget there are also my books

"Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers" available on all Amazon platforms worldwide as well as Audible.

This is a practical guide to enable people to start Social Selling, with now some 45 x 5 Star reviews.

In my second book "Smarketing - How to Achieve Competitive Advantage through blended sales and marketing" we take the reader through a change program to enable sales and marketing to work better together. There is a lot of talk about getting sales and marketing to work together, this book is a practical guide to enable you to do just that. Again, this is available on Amazon platforms world-wide.