The Best Management & Leadership Books

The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List

2008 Edition: Revised and Updated

Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.

About This Category:

The Management &; Leadership category will help you become a respected and effective executive manager. The books in this category will teach you:

How to get the most from your employees.
How to set priorities and make good decisions.
How to improve your leadership skills.

First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman

Most "common knowledge" about how to manage employees is completely misguided. If you want to succeed as a manager, you're going to have to break a few rules.

Based on in-depth interviews of 80,000 managers in 400 companies by the Gallup Organization, First, Break All The Rules shows that the world’s best managers break virtually every conventional “rule” of management practice.

In this book, Buckingham and Coffman show why exceptional managers select employees for talent, not experience, intelligence, or determination. Effective managers define the right outcomes for people, not the right steps; they focus on developing employee strengths, not eradicating weaknesses; they find the right fit for employees in the organization instead of relentlessly promoting people to their level of incompetence.

First, Break All The Rules will help you examine what you believe about effective management and encourage you to think of ways to set people up for success in your organization from the beginning.

12: The Elements of Great Managing by Rodd Wagner & James Harter

Great businesses attract and retain talented and productive people. If you want to create an environment where people work happily and productively, this book will teach you how.

12: The Elements of Great Managing is a follow-up to First, Break All The Rules that teaches you how to keep your employees happy and create a strong company culture.

Like all of Gallup's books, this text is backed by an extraordinary degree of research, observation, and empirical evidence. Focusing on what keeps employees actively engaged in their work, Wagner and Harter have discovered twelve elements that largely determine how satisfied people are with their work. Unlike other texts on employee satisfaction, each element is supported by data drawn from thousands of companies around the world, not anecdotal evidence, so you can put full faith and trust in the recommendations in this book.

If your people really are "your greatest asset," read 12: The Elements of Great Managing and make it a priority to create a plan to improve your company's performance on each of these twelve elements as soon as possible.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith

C-level executives at all companies tend to be intelligent, driven, dedicated, and hard-working. The primary difference between effective and ineffective leaders is interpersonal skills: great leaders act in ways that engage instead of annoy others.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There exposes 20 unconscious habits that are holding you back as an effective manager and leader, then teaches you how to eliminate them.

In this book, veteran executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shares his years of experience in helping top executives at Fortune 500 companies change their behavior and improve their interpersonal skills. Although many leaders are rightfully proud of their accomplishments, the personality traits that they credit their success to may be the very tendencies that are limiting their promotion potential.

In What Got You Here Won't Get You There, you'll learn about the dangers of "winning too much", adding too much value, refusing to share information, and taking too much credit for results. By staying mindful of the subtle ways you communicate disrespect for your peers and subordinates, you'll improve your relationships with your associates dramatically.

(Note: this book is a fantastic blueprint for soliciting feedback from your business parters and employees to discover what you need to work on. If you'd like help conducting a review, I'm happy to help.)

Growing Great Employees by Erika Andersen

Setting strategy and "creating the vision" are sexy parts of management, but one of the most important and under-appreciated parts of being a manager is helping your direct reports to grow and develop. This book shows you how.

Using a creative very useful gardening metaphor, Growing Great Employees is a primer on how to help your employees flourish by mindfully cultivating their skills and talents.

Erika Anderson has a great deal of knowledge and expertise in helping people grow, and she shares her secrets liberally in this book. You'll learn how to listen to and appreciate other people's needs, look for the right employees for your business, hire employees with promise and potential, set appropriate expectations, manage people how they like to be managed, coach instead of order, make clear agreements, handle difficulties, and encourage their autonomy.

Improving your management skills takes time and effort, but Growing Great Employeeswill set you on the path of becoming a manager people will be happy to report to.

Hiring Smart by Pierre Mornell

Nothing kills morale and momentum like a bad hire. In Hiring Smart, psychologist and veteran interviewer Pierre Mornell shares his tips and tricks for avoiding mistakes while identifying the best person for the job.

The objective of every interview is to: (1) get to know the candidate, (2) judge their fit for the job, (3) determine if they'll work well in the organization, and (4) discover any major issues before an offer is made. Mornell's tactics make it easy to learn everything you need to know about a prospective employee before bringing them on board.

Reading Hiring Smart can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars, months (or years) of lost time, and a great deal of stress and heartache. Time invested reading this book before hiring an employee is time well spent.

(Note: special thanks to Kevin Kelly for recommending this book.)

The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig

In this book, Phil Rosenzweig kills all of the sacred cows of modern management theory, grinds them up into hamburger, adds a massive pile of charcoal, strikes a match, and creates a bonfire large enough to be seen from space.

In The Halo Effect, Rosenzweig argues that most business managers and the business press are systematically delusional when it comes to picking theories about the reasons for strong company performance.

The nine delusions covered in this book read like a management-oriented version of How to Lie with Statistics: confusing temporary fortune with lasting success, correlation vs. causation errors, pervasive sample bias, favoring for single explanations instead of multiple factors, inadequate business comparisons, poor data quality, comparing results on absolute instead of relative terms, and searching for the "formula" for perpetual success.

Rosenzweig isn't shy about kicking butt and taking names: you'll learn why Good to Great, Built to Last, In Search of Excellence, and other high-profile business books of the past few decades have more value as "business bedtime stories" than as blueprints for improving company performance.

After reading The Halo Effect, you'll develop a healthy degree of skepticism when it comes to the latest management fads, be able to identify when you're in danger of succumbing to wishful thinking, and be better prepared to avoid falling for the promise of a simple solution to management issues.

Judgement by Noel Tichy & Warren Bennis

Great leaders are able to stay focused and make good decisions, even in times of ambiguity, hardship, and crisis. Judgment will teach you how to make good decisions in even the worst of situations.

Bennis & Tichy have studied executive leaders for decades, and this book contains the essence of what they've learned about the art of making good decisions. Leadership can sometimes be a nebulous topic to explain, but the examples and anecdotes contained in this text show effective leaders in action, clearly highlighting the principles at work.

In Judgment, you'll learn how effective leaders recognize the critical moments where a decision should be made, make the call, and execute the plan after the decision is made. You'll also discover the power of the "teachable point of view": concisely communicating your purpose and intent to the people you lead.

The decisions you make as a business leader can make or break your company. Judgment will teach you how to make good calls more often.

The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan by George Bradt, Jayme Check, & Jorge Pedraza

Walking into a new leadership assignment is tough: to succeed, you're going to need a plan. The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan will guide you through the process of planning the first 100 days of your new role.

In this book, you'll learn how to plan to make a great first impression, gain allies in your new role quickly, manage your team, collect early wins, set a new strategic direction, and avoid common mistakes and pitfalls that often trip up new leaders.

In addition to containing great information, this book also features a set of downloadable forms that will help you start planning quickly and easily.

The next time you're ready to take on a new leadership challenge, pick up The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan.

The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker

All modern theories of management, traced to their source, eventually lead to Peter Drucker. The Essential Drucker is an edited collection of Peter Drucker's most influential thoughts about the practice of management.

Drucker held the view that the manager is the central element in every business, responsible for organizing resources and ensuring they're used to maximum effect. You'll learn the three primary functions of management: managing the business, managing other managers, and managing subordinates, and how setting clear objectives and measures is absolutely essential to the success of the firm.

Good management is not necessarily exciting: on the surface, the lack of drama could be seen as downright boring, but keeping the system running smoothly frees up resources and energy to move the business forward. By reading The Essential Drucker and making an effort to apply Drucker's suggestions to your business, you'll be superbly prepared to handle managerial responsibility.

Ethics for the Real World by Ronald Howard & Clinton Korver

As a business leader, your actions can affect thousands (if not millions) of people. Deciding in advance how you want to act - and why - will help you maintain your ethical standards, even in the face of ambiguity and pressure.

Ethics for the Real World takes an "engineering" approach to ethical decision-making: it guides you through the process of creating a personal set of ethical standards you can use to guide your actions.

It's difficult to write a useful about about ethics without moralizing, but Howard & Korver have done it. In this book, you'll learn how to understand when a situation is becoming ethically questionable, develop a personal code of ethical principles, use those principles to decide how to act appropriately, and develop alternatives to acting in an unethical manner to avoid compromising your standards.

The world is not a black and white place: shades of grey are everywhere. By taking the advice in Ethics for the Real World, you'll be far less likely to make a business decision you bitterly regret.