Business books that will make you a better person

The Backstory

Some years ago, my boss and mentor gave me an ultimatum: if I didn’t start making a greater impact, he would pull me out of a new high-profile assignment that was pivotal to the company’s continued success.

I was neither unqualified nor doing bad work. I was simply drowning. For the first time in my life there were more things to do than there were hours in the day. “You need to work smarter, not harder,” he said. Knowing that I needed new inputs, I started reading books and blogs on productivity.

Happily this worked, and I was able to live up to his (and the company’s) expectations. More importantly, though, it put me on a path that would do far more than improve my professional performance. It signaled the beginning of an intense, ongoing personal journey—by way of business books—to be a better manager, leader, spouse, father, and human.

Over the years, the books that have influenced me the most are those whose lessons radiate outside the workplace and speak to the person I aspire to be. Whatever your beliefs about work or business or capitalism, whatever pursuit makes you feel at one with the universe, whether you are simply trying to get a promotion or find your life’s calling, here are ten books that will hopefully help you as much as they have me.  

The Books

1. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport

2. How to Invest Your Time Like Money, by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

Cal Newport is about 13 years my junior, but there is no person who has had a greater influence on how I organize my life and pursue my goals than him. It was his blog where I found crucial concepts on fixed schedule productivity and the productivity purge that started it all. While he has never written a “how-to” book about the essentials of time management, he wrote the foreword to Elizabeth Saunders’ book and has often praised her work as an excellent exposition of the principles by which he operates.

Saunders reminds us there are 24 hours in a day and 7 days a week into which we must cram *all* of our activities: work, relationships, hobbies, exercise, all of it. Both she and Newport make it very clear that finding equilibrium in our professional and personal lives requires us to consider and plan *all* of our activities simultaneously. It’s a deceptively simple idea, yet one that too few of us embrace. It is too much to summarize here, but it is a game-changer for both short- and long-term achievement when you do it right.

Newport’s latest book, Deep Work, is a masterpiece that speaks to the central challenge of our time: how to focus on the most important things amidst the never-ending distractions of digital life. Cal Newport doesn’t have social media accounts. Instead, he has focused on the currency important to him, becoming a known and respected leader in his field at astonishing speed while also being a proud and engaged father. Deep Work is a combination of strategy and tactics. You can learn how to decide priorities and then successfully organize yourself to execute on them. Again, this is a game-changer when done well.

3. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen

How many of us, upon hearing of someone who was a loyal employee, never missing a day of work only to have a wreck of a home life and die with regrets, have said, “I’ll never be like that!”? How many of us, upon watching corporate miscreants get caught and go to jail, have said, “I’ll never be like that!”? Do you believe these people set out to be unhappy, or to ignore the important people in their lives, or to become criminals?

Clay Christensen is a world-renowned Harvard strategy professor who, among other things, teaches his MBA students how to think broadly about their professional success such that it includes ideas like happiness, warm relationships, and personal integrity. He is also a deeply religious man. Whatever your confession (or lack thereof), this book will make you think about the whole of what you do and its impact on how you live. One of the ways I put these ideas into practice is by using his principle of “likeness” in goal setting, or what it will “look like” if you are achieving your goals. This helps me work backward to figure out what specifically I need to do to succeed.

4. Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet

I could not have read this book at a more opportune time in my professional life. I had just started a job leading a team of 85 people. The most I had ever managed previously was five. I don’t care who you are: the moment this happens to you, the world changes. You go from being a player-coach to being the Boss, the person everyone is looking to, above and below, for answers.

For Marquet, a submariner, this happened when he was promoted to Captain in the US Navy (he’s now retired). Upon inheriting the worst-performing boat in the fleet, Marquet slowly set out to change the culture of his team, the crew. He knew the traditional Navy leadership approach of “take control, give orders” had led his crew to their dismal position. Only by instilling a sense of engagement and accountability would he be able to “turn the ship around”. He succeeded. His boat went from last to first, achieving the highest retention and operational standing in the fleet.

Marquet’s three Cs—Control, Competence, and Clarity—are the most empowering management principles I have ever come across. My team didn’t know it, but we were all part of a grand social experiment in which I used Marquet's ideas to turn our “ship” around. We went from last to first in employee satisfaction ratings, developed our next generation of leaders, and added over three points to operating margin in a very complicated business.

5. Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio

6. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brené Brown

What do a billionaire investment guru and a Ph. D. social worker have in common? They each recognize how profoundly damaging our egos can be to our success in work and in life. When we protect our delicate selves (often unwittingly), we lose the ability to recognize and accept our weaknesses. We don’t see our mistakes, we miss opportunities, and we start to wonder what’s wrong with everyone else when the problem is looking back at us in the mirror.

The central and shared principle of their work is what Dalio calls “radical truthfulness” and Brown calls “vulnerability”. Put simply, it is the belief that success is vastly easier to achieve when we first acknowledge our weaknesses and ignorance. When we allow ourselves to be imperfect, we open ourselves up to ideas and input from others. The alternative is letting our discomfort dictate our behavior, which often leads to self-sabotage. Their ideas are thought provoking and well substantiated.

I wish I had come upon these books earlier in my career, Nevertheless, I feel fortunate that I did come upon them and have been able to internalize their principles. It is hard work, and is not for the faint of heart as it conjures up feelings of doubt, guilt, and even humiliation. But you come out the other side a whole, healthy, and indeed much calmer person.

7. Being the Boss: The Three Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, by Linda A. Hill and Kent Linebeck

Being the Boss is a great read, whether you are at the beginning, middle, or late in your career. I come back to it at least once a year and continue to find it instructive.

The book begins by noting the inherent paradoxes of leadership. A leader’s success invariably and inevitably depends on what other people do, on context and dynamics that we do not directly control, on the need to execute today and be prepared for tomorrow. The challenge is daunting. Hill and Linebeck state unequivocally that much of a leader’s work is a matter of judgment and that the paradoxes are never fully resolved, which is precisely what makes it a stressful and personal journey.

One of my favorite parts of Being the Boss is the section on the importance of networks. The authors advocate building strategic, operational, and developmental networks as a way of ensuring regular opportunities for learning and growth. I received similar advice from my mentor (the same one who told me to get my act together), and it has been an invaluable element in my development.

While this book is explicitly about management, its lessons resonate for personal life as well. Whether one aspires to lead or not, we make a mistake if we don’t view ourselves as the leaders of our daily existence and seek to “hard code” the opportunity to learn from others.

8. Organizational Physics - The Science of Growing a Business, by Lex Sisney

You have probably heard of studies like Myers-Briggs which provide frameworks for classifying people based on broad behavioral tendencies. Are you introverted or extroverted? Do you try to shape your environment or respond to it? Are you detail oriented or a “big picture” person? By answering these different questions, we are meant to discover our strengths and weaknesses.

In Organizational Physics, Lex Sisney takes these concepts and explicitly ties them to organizational design. Using four “personality types”—Producers, Stabilizers, Innovators, and Unifiers—he lays out a compelling approach for ensuring that we hire the right types of people for different functional roles, and then design reporting lines that facilitate the success of the teams and the company as a whole.

You don’t have to agree with Sisney’s classification scheme. In my current company, we use DISC Profiles (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) as a way of learning more about each other. It’s different, but achieves the same purpose. Whatever the approach, the wisdom of his approach is indisputable. Moreover, Sisley’s book, like those by Dalio and Brown, steers us to reflect on our own tendencies. How well do we really know ourselves? Are we being honest about our own capabilities? The more honest we are, the more successful and happy we will be.

9. The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

If I had a dollar for every sales or client service rep I’ve spoken to who chalks up his/her success to a special relationship-building “sauce”, I would be fabulously wealthy. Equipped with years worth of data on sales achievement, Dixon and Adamson illustrate that hiring these types of would be a mistake.

Being nice and attentive in relationships, personal or professional, is never a bad thing, yet it isn’t the most correlated with high performance. The profile that most consistently overachieves is one they call the “Challengers”. They may be good relation builders, but what they don’t do is allow themselves to be walked on regularly or shy away from confronting difficult situations, like pricing discussions. Challengers have three defining characteristics:

1. They teach their clients something.
2. They tailor their discussions to their clients business.
3. They take control of the conversation without avoiding or capitulating on difficult topics.

There is much to like in this book. It is a sensible, evidence-based approach to sales that enables reps to be heard above the din of repetitive and unimaginative pitches and engage in satisfying one-on-one discussions that ultimately drive sales. As importantly, it is an approach that prioritizes respectful dialog, situational empathy, and acting like a grown-up. For these reasons, being a “Challenger” is equally satisfying on a personal basis as well. It allows us to feel confident negotiating compensation or trying to work through difficult issues instead of abrogating our agency because we are programmed to believe that we shouldn’t rock the boat. In short, Challenger Sale allows us to be good partners and not compliant sheep.

10. The New Leader’s 100 Day Action Plan, by George B. Bradt et al. or 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role, by Pam Fox Rollin

Okay, if you’ve made it this far and you’re saying “Not another ‘So you're a new manager?’ book!”, just bear with me. These two books aren’t so much about principles of leadership as they are about action and what you need to do when you start something new. From understanding your role to identifying key players around you, from establishing a vision to delivering results, either one of these books will get you there. I have referred to them on multiple occasions as I have started new jobs or my responsibilities have changed. The activities in these books are equally applicable for entrepreneurs as well as new endeavors in one’s personal life.

Bonus: Atomic Habits, by James Clear

I was turned on to this book a couple weeks ago in a blogpost by Cal Newport. I am only about one-third of the way through it, but I am sure it will become one of the top books my list.

My primary weakness isn’t that I don’t know what to do or how to do it. Rather it is that sometimes it takes me a lot of effort to remain disciplined. As anyone else who struggles with this will tell you, simply trying harder doesn't work. This is where Clear's book comes in. Clear was, literally and horrifyingly, struck in the face with a baseball bat with such severity that he is lucky to be alive, much less to be fully functioning and successful. What he learned through his recovery forms the basis of this book.

James Clear has taken the long road, the one that hinges not on a few big changes, but on steady “1% improvements.” His understanding of how we form habits—how we can cement good ones and, more importantly, defuse bad ones—has me reading raptly. Actually, it has me listening raptly. I’m going through a test drive of Audible, Amazon’s audiobook service. I’m really enjoying, not least because the book is narrated by Clear himself, whose tone and pacing make listening very pleasurable. I am finding I am more focused, too, and haven’t been tempted to skim.

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I hope you’ve found this list interesting and even helpful. I’d be grateful for your suggestions in the comments as well.