Leaders Ahoy! Developing Leadership through Reading Books

Today, there is a glut of books – reports – materials on leadership. Amazon has 141,570 books on leadership not counting the additional ones cross-categorized in other buckets.

So how do you understand leadership?

This was the question that came up as the real issue of choices cropped its ugly head. After spending some time mulling on this, listed below are my thoughts:

The way to think about leadership is not in terms of behaviours, didactic wisdom or summaries of books. Rather, a distinctive approach would be to shift the debate from that of a competency orientation to that of stages in the leadership journey. The fundamental assumption here is that each one of us have what it takes to be a leader within us that may or may not flower depending on the appropriate situation and where we are in the leadership maturity curve.

The curve in itself consists of the following stages: know thyself, defining leadership, communicate and inspire, grit to keep going and finally, facing reality. Sounds simple…but therein lies the crux.

This does not in no way belittles the importance of experiences. The point being made is that of a complementary toolset that enables individual development in parallel with leadership journey.

In keeping with the concept of the power of one*, I have shared recommendation of one book in each of the stages. A note of disclaimer: These are my personal views and neither are they the sole representatives of each category.

Category #1: Know thyself and what you need to build (discipline, sense of purpose, humility) The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Finding out what we want in life and pursuing our own journeys)

Category #2: Top book in Defining Leadership (what is leadership and how it is applied, reading about other leaders) Good to Great: Why Some Companies make the Lead…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (Based on evaluation of thousands of articles and interview transcripts to identify leadership traits)

Category #3: Communicate and Inspire Leadership by Rudolf Giuliani (Taking control of a situation while at the same time ensuring that you drive your own communication agenda)

 Category #4: Grit to keep going The Billion Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth (Pressures of finding a drug candidate in a start up)

Category #5: Facing reality Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done; by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck (Execution does a great job of driving leaders into action)

Developing a worldview is of paramount importance and nothing beats reading books that broaden your horizons. Final category is developing perspective that is a separate workflow in itself. Recommendations are several as listed. - Ascent of Money and Empire: Two separate books by Niall Ferguson; Books by Malcom Gladwell; The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene; Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christenson; Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne; Lean Startup by Eric Ries; Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence; The Terror by Dan Simmons & On War by Clausewitz

PS *The One Thing by Gary Keller