Top 5 Business Books for Emerging Thought Leaders
No matter the profession, guidance is vital to success! Whether it be engaging with thought leaders, researching tips, or reading a book; finding that person or people that turn the motivational gears can be your key to innovation! Informational books written by leaders in business can give proper guidance, insight, and valuable advice to those struggling or looking for a new direction. Today, we’re bringing you some of the best, most popular business-related books to hit the charts since January 2019. Check out our list and let us know which books you recommend to businessmen and women!
Stillness is the Key- This first book, Stillness is the Key, is written by Ryan Holiday and has received a number of accolades on sites such as Amazon, Google, Goodreads, and Barnes and Noble. In fact, the book was a #1 NYTimes Bestseller AND a Wall Street Journal Best Seller.Holiday is not only an author but an entrepreneur, marketer, and founder of advisory firm Brass Check. His experience along with his unique expertise on business allow an incredibly helpful insight into stillness. Holiday tells how steadiness in times of turbulence can allow avenues for success. Using a unique approaches such as meditation and other ancient wisdoms, Holiday takes exemplary figures from history that demonstrated stillness and thus demonstrated power through adversity. Such figures include baseball player Sadaharu Oh, Winston Churchill, Fred Rogers, and Anne Frank. He catapults these “still” figures with those that demonstrated an immense capacity for thought such as Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, and Nietzsche. By drawing on example and personal experience Holiday is able to accurately depict a full circle image of what stillness should look like and how to achieve this state of being. While this may not be your run of the mill ‘business’ book, it certainly brings a unique perspective to those looking to reduce stress in their high stress occupations. Give it a read and consider implementing a sense of stillness into your daily routine.
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries- Number 2 on our list of must-reads comes from Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton alum, Safi Bacall. Bacall is not only an author but also a second-generation physicist, biotech entrepreneur, and a former CEO - Talk about an awesome resume. Loonshots was Bacall’s first book which won him incredible acclaim from mega-thought leaders such as Bill Gates, Daniel Kahneman, and Senator Bob Kerrey. Furthermore, according to Bacall’s site, the book was translated into 18 different languages, and was “featured in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Forbes, Newsweek, Nature, Scientific American, and the Harvard Business Review; and selected by Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, Susan Cain, and Adam Grant for the Next Big Idea Club.” Throughout the book, Bacall challenges group behavior by focusing on phase transitions. This focus studies how companies will begin full sail towards innovation, new ideas, and change, and then suddenly stop in their tracks. He also touches on culture and structure and how they affect these ‘phase transitions’. If you’re an entrepreneur, creative, or visionary looking for life-lessons, Loonshots is your next read.
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell- Trillion Dollar Coach is an awesome read by three authors: Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle. A bit of information on the authors: Schmidt is both a businessman and software engineer and currently sits as a chair on the US Department of Defense’s “Innovation Board.” He also has major ties to Google being CEO (01-11) and Exec. Chairman (11-15). Most recently, he was the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015-17. Also with close ties to Google, Rosenberg is the Senior VP or Products at Google and is the current advisor to Alphabet Inc’s Larry Page. Our third and final author of Trillion Dollar Coach is Alan Eagle. Eagle is the current Director of Executive Communications at Google and has maintained that title since he started with the company in ‘07. This book, with three powerful minds at the forefront is a crucial must-read. The authors along with the late coach and business mogul Bill Campbell (1940-2016) brings together a compelling read that will benefit business folk as well as other motivational readers looking for inspiration. According to Amazon, “Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple, and Intuit, fostering deep relationships with Silicon Valley visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt.” For thoughts from business leaders to principles from Campbell, the book is one you’ll want to pick up and read straight through to the end.
Nine Lies about Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World- Our fourth pick for best business-related books comes from another set of authors: Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. Coming from across the pond, Marcus Buckingham is a British author, business consultant, and motivational speaker. Goodall hails from good ole’ New Jersey and, along with his authorship, currently sits as SVP, Leadership, and Team Intelligence at Cisco. Together they wrote Nine Lies about Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World. This book focuses on nine specific lies that the workforce believes and how to counteract them. Amazon raves saying: “With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that such freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company's culture, that matter most; that we should focus less on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people's goals we should strive to align people's sense of purpose and meaning; that people don't want constant feedback, they want helpful attention.”
The Infinite Game- Another British author, Simon Sinek is the genius behind our fifth and final must-read titled The Infinite Game. Along with his authorship, Sinek is also a motivational speaker and organizational consultant. This book focuses on games that have no end (thus the name, Infinite Game) and allows insight into how to succeed in those seemingly infinite games. He promotes what he refers to as an “infinite mindset” to build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. His claim is that those that maintain this mindset will lead the next generation into the future and beyond.
Honorable Mentions:
The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
Extreme Economies: What Life at the World’s Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future (Release Date: 1/14/2020)
Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments! We would also love to hear your reviews on these books if you’ve read them!