The following two quotes sum up my ideal of leadership.
“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” ~ Ronald Reagan
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” ~ Lao Tzu
There are a lot of books on leadership. Even if you read a couple of them repeatedly, the leadership ideal in your mind gets renewed. However media or popular literature of a period portrays it, over the course of human history, leadership has always been about altruism. About someone deciding to take responsibility for someone other than themselves, someone deciding to step up and be the ‘shepherd that gives his life to the lamb’. I’ll expand on this thought later. The focus of this post is to list some outstanding books that could be helpful in general.
While reading Goldratt - The Goal, I happened to land on a website named TOC Institute which had a detailed summary of the Goal. It mentions that The Goal is one of three books that Jeff Bezos requires his top management team to read. The 3 books are -
- The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
- The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
- Goldratt - The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox
I’ve read 1 & 3 and am yet to read #2. I’d definitely recommend 1 & 3 to anyone. Over the last decade, I’ve had the opportunity to groom engineers to become tech leads, architects and first-time engineering managers . Teaching and coaching are my core strengths and I think if I get to do more of it, I’d definitely have more of a sense of fulfillment. For the managers, two books that I’ve always recommended are Management by Drucker and Good to Great by Jim Collins. In fact, the revised edition of Management has an awesome foreword by Jim Collins. My top 3 books would be the following -
- Management : Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices by Peter Drucker
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
- Fox - How to Become CEO: The Rules for Rising to the Top of Any Organization by Jeffrey Fox
As I mentioned earlier, there are many more great books and a few more come to my mind at this time. Couple of years back, one of my team leads suggested The Manager’s Path and I found it to be an excellent read, especially for folks in management in tech companies. Two other books by Jim Collins that I found to be super inspirational were - Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All and Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. I listened to the audiobook version of these books during my runs in the past, and they were special because Jim Collins himself narrates them in his very persuasive and inspiring voice. Other books that come to mind are The 5 Levels of Leadership - Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential by John C. Maxwell, Start with Why by Simon Sinek, and Multipliers - How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman.