Leadership Library
Below, you can find notes from some of the best books on strategy, leadership, and living a life of joy and fulfillment.
My Favorite Leadership Books
-
![]()
-
![]()
-
![]()
Being Productive
-
![]()
All Personal Growth & Leadership Books
Click on the title to find a synthesis of the key concepts and interesting quotes. Clients may request the full notes for any book.
#
The 4-Hour Workweek
“Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it. I call this the ‘freedom multiplier.’”
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“We react to urgent matters. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more proactivity.”
10% Happier
“What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, ‘respond’ rather than simply ‘react.’”
The 12 Week Year
“The most important lead indicator you have is a measure of your execution.”
A
About Face
“Sometimes all the motivation a guy needs is a little respect, and a damn good leader who shares common ground.”
Acting with Power
“Most books on power are about winning battles with other people. This one is about winning battles with ourselves.”
The Advice Trap
“You’ve likely given well-considered and useful advice to someone in the last day or two. But your advice works less well, and more often than you’d think…”
The Art of Gathering
“If you are going to hold your guests captive, you had better do it well.”
The Art of Somatic Coaching
“The distance we live from our body is the distance we live from our self, from our emotional reality.”
The Art of War
“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
The Artist's Journey
“The great secret that every artist and mystic knows is that profound can be reached best by concentrating upon the mundane. Do you want to write? Sit down at the keyboard.”
Atomic Habits
“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”
B
Barking up the Wrong Tree
“Much of what we’ve been told about the qualities that lead to achievement is logical, earnest—and downright wrong.”
Biased
“It can happen unconsciously. It can happen effortlessly. And it can happen in a matter of milliseconds. These associations can take hold of us no matter our values, no matter our conscious beliefs, no matter what kind of person we wish to be in the world.”
Blue Ocean Strategy
“Instead of dividing up existing—and often shrinking—demand and benchmarking competitors, blue ocean strategy is about growing demand and breaking away from the competition.”
The Book of Five Rings
“Whenever we have become preoccupied with small detail, we must suddenly change into a large spirit, interchanging large with small.”
Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling
“Keep in mind that professional upward mobility requires action on your part. It’s unrealistic to expect that your managers and colleagues will automatically want and know how to unearth the true you and understand all you are capable of offering.”
Breaking Through
“Confidence, or self-confidence, may be the most important of the required personal resources, yet is perhaps the most intangible.”
Brief
“Brevity starts with deep expertise. Only with thorough knowledge can you accurately make a summary.”
The Bullet Journal Method
“The significance of what we’re doing, or how we’re doing it, pales in comparison to why we’re doing it in the first place.”
C
Call Sign Chaos
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Can't Hurt Me
“So I sought out pain, fell in love with suffering, and eventually transformed myself from the weakest piece of shit on the planet into the hardest man God ever created, or so I tell myself.”
Caste
“‘There is never caste,’ the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. ‘Only castes.’”
The Checklist Manifesto
“That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. …It is a checklist.”
The Coaching Habit
“Your job as a manager and a leader is to help create the space for people to have those learning moments.”
Coaching for Performance
“We have a measure of choice and control over what we are aware of, but what we are unaware of controls us.”
The Color of Law
“We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies.”
Competing Against Luck
“To elevate innovation from hit-or-miss to predictable, you have to understand the underlying causal mechanism—the progress a consumer is trying to make in particular circumstances.”
Connect
“This book is about a special type of relationship we call exceptional.”
The Corporate Athlete
“The Corporate Athlete is any individual who wants to achieve maximum performance.”
The Creative Habit
“More than anything, this book is about preparation: In order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.”
Creativity
“Let me reassure you. When you’re being creative there is no such thing as a mistake.”
The Culture Code
“Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.”
D
Dare to Lead
“You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck.”
Deep Work
“The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.”
Dereliction of Duty
“The disaster in Vietnam was not the result of impersonal forces but a uniquely human failure…. The failings were many and reinforcing: arrogance, weakness, lying in the pursuit of self-interest, and, above all, the abdication of responsibility to the American people.”
Designing Your Life
“A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise.”
Designing Your Work Life
“Redesigning isn’t easy, but it’s a lot easier than starting over, so let’s at least understand the redesign option and try a few ideas before we make any rash decisions.”
The Dichotomy of Leadership
“Ownership is the foundation of good leadership. But leadership seldom requires extreme ideas or attitudes. In fact, quite the opposite is true: leadership requires balance.”
Digital Minimalism
“Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”
Do the Work
“Don’t prepare. Begin.”
Drive
“Our current operating system has become far less compatible with, and at times downright antagonistic to: how we organize what we do; how we think about what we do; and how we do what we do.”
Duty
“I’m not afraid to make decisions, and obviously, neither is the president.”
Dying for a Paycheck
“The workplace, as it is currently being managed by many if not most employers in the United States, exacts a toll for both employees and their employers—a situation that cries out for remediation.”
E
The Effective Executive
“Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
Effortless
“Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way.”
Eleven Rings
“That’s how I view leadership. It’s an act of controlled improvisation, a Thelonious Monk finger exercise, from one moment to the next.”
Emotional Intelligence
“People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity….”
Essentialism
“…Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.”
Executive Presence
“It is executive presence—and no man or woman attains a top job, lands an extraordinary deal, or develops a significant following without this heady combination of confidence, poise, and authenticity that convinces the rest of us we’re in the presence of someone who’s the real deal."
Expect to Win
“No one else can be you the way you can; this is your source of power within the organization.”
The Extraordinary Leader
“Extraordinary leaders will consistently achieve results that far exceed those of the good leaders. They will create even less turnover, motivate employees to a much higher degree, and satisfy customers to a much higher level.”
Extreme Ownership
“The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. ...The best leaders don’t just take responsibility for their job. They take Extreme Ownership of everything that impacts there’s mission.”
F
The Fearless Organization
“For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge!”
The First 90 Days
“The qualities that have made you successful so far (it’s worth being clear in your own mind what your hammer is) can prove to be weaknesses in your new role.”
Flatlining
“You know, I’m equal, I’m here, I made it, we have the same degree, the same everything. I still feel like I have to prove myself a little bit more.”
Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor
Don’t get me wrong: mentors matter. You absolutely need them. But they’re not your ticket to the top. Mentors give, whereas sponsors invest.
The Four Agreements
“If you consider hell as a state of mind, then hell is all around us.”
G
Getting Things Done
“...the key to managing all of your stuff is managing your actions.”
Give and Take
“The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle.”
Good to Great
“That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem.”
The Good Jobs Strategy
“So how can it be that a lot of companies offer such bad jobs? Wouldn’t they want to make their employees more satisfied in order to bolster sales and profits?”
Great by Choice
“The critical question is not ‘Are you lucky?’ but ‘Do you get a high return on luck?’”
Grit
“Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.”
H
Happy Money
“Research shows that experiences provide more happiness than material goods in part because experiences are more likely to make us feel connected to others.”
Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, & Total Nonsense
“Evidence-based management is based on the belief that facing the hard facts about what works and what doesn’t, understanding the dangerous half-truths that constitute so much conventional wisdom about management, and rejecting the total nonsense that too often passes for sound advice will help organizations perform better.”
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
“My greatest management discovery through the transition was that peacetime and wartime require radically different management styles. Interestingly, most management books describe peacetime CEO techniques and very few describe wartime.”
Having It All...and Making It Work
“First, we need to face a simple fact of life: Balance won't happen on its own; we have to create it.”
High Output Management
“The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”
Hooked
“Perhaps more startling, fully one-third of Americans say they would rather give up sex than lose their cell phones.”
How to Be an Antiracist
“The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’”
How to Succeed in Business Without Being White
“African Americans have always had to work twice as hard to get half as much, and we have also had to take risks in order to get ahead.”
How Will You Measure Your Life?
“The problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy.”
How to Win Friends and Influence People
“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
How Women Rise
“So we repeat: we are not trying to gloss over or deny obstacles that we know are real. However, our primary focus in this book is not on identifying external barriers or providing road maps around them.”
Humor, Seriously
“Humor is a superpower, but unlike invisibility, laser vision, and being superhuman, it’s one we all secretly possess.”
I
Immunity to Change
“In other words, we may be unable to bring about the changes we want because we are misdiagnosing our aspiration as technical, when in reality it is an adaptive challenge.”
Indistractable
“Distraction, it turns out, isn’t about the distraction itself; rather, it’s about how we respond to it.”
The Innovator's Dilemma
”The very processes and values that constitute an organization’s capabilities in one context, define its disabilities in another context.”
Invisible Women
“The real reason we exclude women is because we see the rights of 50% of the population as a minority interest.”
In Search of Excellence
"We have come to believe that the key success factor in business is simply getting one’s arms around almost any practical problem and knocking it off — now."
It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
“The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.”
It Worked for Me
“I try to be an optimist, but I try not to be stupid.”
It’s About Damn Time
“Whenever I doubt myself or I worry that I might be overstepping or thinking too big, I ask myself, ‘What would a White male do?’”
J
Joy at Work
“Just as tidying the home sparks joy in our lives, tidying the workplace sparks joy in our work, helping us to become more organized and achieve better results.”
K
The Knowing-Doing Gap
“Competitive advantage comes from being able to do something others can’t do. Anyone can read a book or attend a seminar. The trick is in turning the knowledge acquired into organizational action.”
L
Language and the Pursuit of Leadership Excellence
“Many of us have come to this observation: maybe, for today and tomorrow, the ‘mother of all competencies’ for individuals and for organizations, is learning how to learn.”
Lead from the Outside
“What holds us back is not scope. It’s fear.”
Lead Yourself First
“The biggest mistake I’ve made in my career to date is believing that solitude is a luxury”
Leaders Eat Last
“If certain conditions are met and the people inside an organization feel safe among each other, they will work together to achieve things none of them could have ever achieved alone.”
The Leadership Dojo
“Exemplary leaders do more than talk a good game. Their presence and actions back what comes out of their mouths.”
Leadership Strategy and Tactics
“Subordinate your ego, build relationships, and win the long game.”
Lean In
“My argument is that getting rid of these internal barriers is critical to gaining power.”
The Lean Startup
“Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow.”
Let My People Go Surfing
“One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is: If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.”
Let the Story Do the Work
“The idea is that your story, no matter how well told, can’t achieve its full intended effect until you embed within it an emotional quality aligned with your purpose.”
Let Your Life Speak
“Vocation at its deepest level is, ‘This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.’”
Letters to a Young Athlete
“To be great, you have to be hungry. You have to stay hungry.”
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
“...when you put your house in order, you put your affairs and your past in order, too. As a result, you can see quite clearly what you need in life and what you don’t, and what you should and shouldn’t do.”
The Likeability Trap
“For us, the success penalty isn’t merely a professional impediment; it’s a mindfuck.”
Living Beautifully
“It isn’t the current story line that’s the root of our pain; it’s our propensity to be bothered in the first place.”
M
Made to Stick
“To a CEO, “maximizing shareholder value” may be an immensely useful rule of behavior. To a flight attendant, it’s not.”
Making Great Strategy
"Without an argument, strategy is often vacuous, confused, or misdirected. In the worst case, strategy without an argument may involve cluelessly gambling the future of a company."
Managing the Non-Profit Organization
“Far too many leaders believe that what they do and why they do it must be obvious to everyone in the organization. It never is.”
Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1-1: Strategy
“In fact, strategy is very seldom if ever made in a fully rational way.”
Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1-3: Tactics
“In order to act consistently faster than the enemy, it is necessary to do more than move quickly. It is also necessary to make rapid transitions from one action to another.”
Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 7: Learning
“Naturally, ‘a subordinate’s willingness to admit mistakes depends on the commander’s willingness to tolerate them.’”
Mastering Leadership
“There is no safe way to be great, and, there is no great way to be safe.”
Measure What Matters
“Or as Larry Page would say, winning organizations need to ‘put more wood behind fewer arrows.’”
Mindset
“This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.”
Minimalism
“Minimalism looks different for everyone because it’s about finding what is essential to you.”
Multipliers
“Multipliers get more from their people because they are leaders who look beyond their own genius and focus their energy on extracting and extending the genius of others.”
N
Never Split the Difference
“Most people approach a negotiation so preoccupied by the arguments that support their position that they are unable to listen attentively.”
No More Invisible Man
"By virtue of their low numbers, black men do experience the heightened visibility that accompanies tokenization. However, this is not the entire picture."
No Rules Rules
“If you build an organization made up of high performers, you can eliminate most controls.”
O
On War
“The best Strategy is always to be very strong, first generally then at the decisive point. Therefore…there is no more imperative and no simpler law for Strategy than to keep the forces concentrated.”
The ONE Thing
“What’s the ONE Thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Option B
“I learned that when life pulls you under, you can kick against the bottom, break the surface, and breathe again.”
Originals
“The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.”
Our Separate Ways
“We found, as we conducted our studies, that women come to the workplace not just from separate directions but from what Kate Rushin calls ‘separate definitions’”
P
The Person You Mean to Be
“The business case for diversity should be part of our motivation for moving from believer to builder, not all of it.”
Playing to Win
“There are multiple ways to win in any almost any industry. That’s why building up strategic thinking capability within your organization is so vital.”
POP!
When it comes to POP!, I see two rules: be clear and be compelling.
Power
“There is no doubt that the world would be a much better, more humane place if people were always authentic, modest, truthful, and consistently concerned for the welfare of others instead of pursuing their own aims. But that world doesn’t exist.”
The Power of Habit
“Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.”
Presence
“When you are not present, people can tell. When you are, people respond.”
Principles: Life and Work
“…it’s worth repeating that realizing that almost all ‘cases at hand’ are just ‘another one of those,’ identifying which ‘one of those’ it is, and then applying well-thought-out principles for dealing with it.”
The Productivity Project
“Somewhere toward the end of my project, I arrived at an epiphany: every lesson I learned fell into better management of one of three categories: my time, my attention, and my energy.”
A Promised Land
“Getting things done meant subjecting yourself to criticism, and the alternative—playing it safe, avoiding controversy, following the polls—was not only a recipe for mediocrity but a betrayal of the hopes of those citizens who’d put you in office.”
Psychology for the Fighting Man
“A real bullet forms more habits much faster than a lecture about a bullet.”
The Purpose Path
“Will you still do something with your life that’s worthy of applause, even if no applause is given?”
Q
Questions Are the Answer
“Without changing your questions, you cannot get beyond incremental progress along the same path you’ve been pursuing.”
Quiet
“But there’s a less obvious yet surprisingly powerful explanation for introverts’ creative advantage—an explanation that everyone can learn from: introverts prefer to work independently, and solitude can be a catalyst to innovation.”
R
Radical Candor
“‘Radical Candor’ is what happens when you put ‘Care Personally’ and ‘Challenge Directly’ together.”
Range
“The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”
Rework
“If you’re just going to be like everyone else, why are you even doing this?”
S
Sam Walton: Made in America
“Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it…”
Shoe Dog
“So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”
Simplicity Parenting
“Are we building our families on the four pillars of “too much”: too much stuff, too many choices, too much information, and too fast? I believe that we are.”
So Good They Can’t Ignore You
“‘Follow your passion’ might just be terrible advice.”
Start with Why
“It’s worth repeating: people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”
Story for Leaders
“Plans get you from A to B by the most direct route. Stories get you from A to B by the most interesting route.”
The Strategist
“Many leaders haven’t thought about their own strategies in a very deep way. Often, there is a curious gap between their intellectual understanding of strategy and their ability to drive those insights home in their own businesses.”
Strategize to Win
“The difficulty in successfully mastering an interview and landing the job you want is not a lack of experience, but rather your inability to recognize the skills you already have and craft a story around those experiences.”
Strategy That Works
“Some coherent companies literally exist to change the world or at least their part of it.”
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
“Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.”
Subtract
The question is not, “Should we add or subtract?” The question is, “How do we use both?”
Superbosses
“Superbosses aren’t like most bosses; they follow a playbook all their own.”
Switch
“Trying to fight inertia and indifference with analytical arguments is like tossing a fire extinguisher to someone who’s drowning. The solution doesn’t match the problem.”
T
Team of Teams
“There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission.”
Think Again
“A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.”
Thrive
“To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.”
Tiny Habits
“We are not the problem. Our approach to change is. It’s a design flaw—not a personal flaw.”
Tools of Titans
“There are three things you can’t really face: one is fighting, the second is sex, and the third is comedy. It doesn’t matter who your publicist is or how famous you are, man—if you don’t bring the money, it gets quiet in that room fast.”
Transitions
“Our society confuses them constantly, leading us to imagine that transition is just another word for change. But it isn’t.”
Trillion Dollar Coach
“Coaching is no longer a specialty; you cannot be a good manager with being a good coach.”
Turn the Ship Around!
“I vowed henceforth never to give an order, any order. I would let this be a lesson to myself to keep my mouth shut.”
Turning Pro
“The sure sign of an amateur is he has a million plans and they all start tomorrow.”
U
Unapologetically Ambitious
“There are no two ways about it: Vulnerability is an unavoidable side effect of ambition.”
Unleashed
“Our starting point is that leadership, at its core, isn’t about you. Instead, it’s about how effective you are at empowering other people and unleashing their full potential.”
The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual
“To motivate your people, give them missions that challenge them. After all, they did not join the Army to be bored.”
W
War: How Conflict Shaped Us
“We need to pay attention to war because it is still with us. We need to know about its causes, its impact, how to end it and how to avoid it.”
The War of Art
“Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction.”
The Way We're Working Isn't Working
“The relentless urgency that characterizes most corporate cultures undermines creativity, quality, engagement, thoughtful deliberation, productivity, and, ultimately, performance.”
Weapons of Math Destruction
“So to sum up, these are the three elements of a WMD: Opacity, Scale, and Damage.”
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
“It’s my contention—and it’s the bedrock thesis of this book—that interpersonal behavior is the difference-maker between being great and near-great, between getting the gold and settling for the bronze. (The higher you go, the more your “issues” are behavioral.)”
What Works for Women at Work
“…women need to be politically savvier than men in order to survive and thrive in their careers.”
When Things Fall Apart
“For those who want something to hold on to, life is even more inconvenient.”
When We Stand
“We cannot stand together or seek justice together if we have no time to do so.”
White Fragility
“White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress, at the same time that we come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage.”
Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?
“Reg was always focusing on the future. The next accomplishment. The next objective. It was as if he was always preparing himself for something…”
A World Without Email
“The productivity of the knowledge sector can be significantly increased if we identify workflows that better optimize the human brain’s ability to sustainably add value to information.”