Five Powerful Books For Business Leaders

Leaders are readers. While reading The Campaigns of Napoleon I learned that the influential general and emperor drew his major ideas from reading books. He once said, "I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning." (i.e.: from his reading.)  And his advice to others: "Read and meditate upon the wars of the great captains. This is the only means of learning the art of war."

This same advice applies to the realm of business and enterprise. As the wise man once said, "There's nothing new under the sun." Hence we profit much by reading what other people like us have experienced, encountered, learned from a lifetime of development as leaders. Here are five books I would recommend for your 2018 reading list. At the end of this blog post is a link to another list of books for consideration, books that Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and other leaders read in 2017.

Creativity Inc.

This is the story of Pixar, behind the scenes, from one of the co-founders, Ed Catmull.

The book's subtitle tells the real story of what made Pixar such a superstar: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in The Way of True Inspiration. Unseen forces means forces can refer to forces that are invisible, like the ice below the surface that sunk the Titanic, or it can mean forces that are in plain sight, like Poe's Purloined Letter, but we do not see them. Catmull states that the management team had to be perpetually vigilant. What they were vigilant about was very different from most organizations.

Amazon Link: Creativity Inc.
My Brief Review: How to Create and Manage a Creative Culture: Lessons from the Pixar Experience 

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It Worked for Me

Colin Powell shares the principles that shaped his life and career in this inspiring and engrossing memoir.

This is a book incredibly rich with insights on leadership. Also available as an audiobook, Colin Powell lays out the principles that guided his life. If you don't have time to read the book, or your "want to read soon" stack is too high right now, you can get a flavor of Powell's insights by viewing this 20-slide powerpoint, A Leadership Primer.

Amazon Link: It Worked For Me
A Brief Insight: The Bus To Abilene

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Leading with the Heart

Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski shares the insights he has put into practice over the course of a lifetime.

In some respects, a top-level college coach is a lot like a manager in any business. He has to turn a group of talented individuals into a smoothly running team, and he has to produce results that please the fans of his team--the shareholders of the athletic program. Thus, in Leading with the Heart, Krzyzewski reviews the lessons he's learned as basketball coach at Duke University, and tries to universalize them so they translate to any leadership position. For example, he writes, "Adjustments are not unusual, they are usual. So a leader's ability to think on his feet ... to do things without instruction ... is of paramount importance." Makes sense, as does this admonition: "When teaching, always remember this simple phrase: 'You hear, you forget. You see, you remember. You do, you understand.'"

Amazon Link: Leading with the Heart: Coach K's Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life
Brief overview from Leadership Now

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Education of a Coach
How do great leaders develop? Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Halberstam offers an insightful look at how one of the winningest coaches in NFL history got his chops.

Amazon.com reviewer Noah Pallotta-Walsh wrote: David Halberstam’s, The Education of a Coach, was informative, but also very fascinating. The book tells us Bill Belichick’s background and where he gained extreme love for the game. We see throughout the book who surrounded and taught him so much about the game. The book shows both Belichick’s failures and successes. We see how hard Bill works and the multiple failures he had to experience to achieve greatness. I believe the book goes beyond football and can be inspiring to many. I think that “The Education of a Coach” is a great book and would recommend it to anyone, whether they are a football fan or not.

Amazon Link: The Education of a Coach
Read the Reviews on Goodreads Here

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Becoming Steve Jobs

Business writer Jim Collins (Good To Great) called Steve Jobs one of the two greatest leaders of the past century. Winston Churchill was the other.

Author Brent Schlender is an award-winning career journalist who made his mark writing profiles of high-profile entrepreneurs and business leaders in the digital revolution, including two decades as bureau chief and editor-in-chief at Fortune magazine. One can tell early on that he has had close up access to Jobs for a very long time.

Amazon Link: Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
My Brief Review from this past Spring: Lessons for Leaders from Brent Schlender's Becoming Steve Jobs

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Here's the article that triggered this blog post, 19 Books the world's top CEOs read in 2017.

What are you reading?

Tech Tuesday: Lessons for Leaders from Brent Schlender's Becoming Steve Jobs

It's already been five years since Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs became a NYTimes bestseller. When I reviewed the book in 2012 I concluded, "This eye-opening page-turner is as exciting as any novel."

So when I discovered an audio version of Becoming Steve Jobs at our library two weeks ago, I had two immediate thoughts. First, what more can Brent Schlender say that hasn't already been said? Second, even if there's nothing new I would like to read his story again and see what new pearls I might find. It turned out to be a good decision, because there was plenty new to learn.

The full title is Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. Author Brent Schlender is an award-winning career journalist who made his mark writing profiles of high-profile entrepreneurs and business leaders in the digital revolution, including two decades as bureau chief and editor-in-chief at Fortune magazine. One can tell early on that he has had close up access to Jobs for a very long time.

The structure of the book is linear, beginning with the birth of Apple. But this is not a book about what happened. It is the story of Steve Jobs' education, the events that served to produce one of the great leaders of our time.

In point of fact, according to Jim Collins, author of the bestselling business books Good to Great and Built To Last, there have only been two truly great visionary leaders of the past century, Steve Jobs and Winston Churchill. Each of these men had experienced great failure early in their careers, and each developed a relentlessness and resilience that enabled them to re-emerge as leaders and accomplish great things.

The author's aim was not to assemble anecdotes and Apple trivia. Rather, his stories are shared with an aim to provide lessons that will have value to all of us. One example is the Steve Jobs observation that it's only in hindsight that we can "connect the dots on how things happened," whether in our lives or in business.

It is well known that Steve Jobs was a massive Bob Dylan fan. On one occasion Jobs described to the author the difference between artists and everyone else. "The artistic spirit is willing to take risks." The artist is willing to go out on a limb and risk failure in order to achieve his or her vision. Steve Jobs got this insight about himself, as an artist, by watching Dylan perform. He saw that Dylan was continuously re-inventing his songs, going different places in his performances, challenging himself and his band. It was not about the money. The true artist is always risking failure. Picasso and Dylan were true artists, Steve Jobs pointed out.

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Lessons

Insights from the Steve Jobs story are too numerous to list. Here are a few to whet your appetite in the hopes that you will find a way to read or listen to this book.

1. Jobs' passion for and investment in Pixar was a key component of its success. Schender shows how putting together a solid team is the foundation for miracles.

2. Many achievements were directly related to key partnerships between Steve and various individuals whose talents were affirmed within this relational context. What they accomplished was remarkable, Jobs being the catalyst. He surrounded himself with people smarter than himself and though he demanded a lot, when he had matured he gave them the freedom to push back. No yes-men. They all had a say and worked together to accomplish what needed to be done.

3. Very early on what Steve Jobs saw in his head was an early version of the Internet of Things (IoT) with the Macintosh at the center of a wheel as the hub, all the other elements connected to the hub like spokes. The consumer goods became consumer touch points.

4. Every consumer touchpoint, whether ads or iPhones or iPods and iPads or iTunes downloads, was part of a whole which Steve Jobs saw as The Apple Experience. This Apple Experience was designed to lead people into discovering how easy it is to interface with Apple products. Both easy and elegant.

5. Possibly the most notable product of his life was the iPhone, a product he personally may have not wanted to pursue, but his team had been given the green light and it went on to transform the applications business.

6.  Steve knew that even he had underestimated the potential of consumer electronics. Once this phase of the company began to explode, Apple steadily improved the experience of enjoying and managing music, photos and videos on personal electronic devices making the various technologies coherent in a way that no other company came even close to matching.

7. "The Apple Experience was an unprecedented merger of marketing and technology excellence" designed to make customers want to come back for more "This was a new kind of quality, something consumers have never experienced before."

The book includes the text to Steve Jobs' commencement speech that he gave in Stanford. You can listen to it here, as nearly ten million others have already done.

In case you haven't already noticed, I became quite enthused about this book. If you get the chance, especially if you are in marketing, I strongly recommend this to you.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Don't let it pass you by.

EdNote: Becoming Steve Jobs was co-authored with Rick Tetzeli.