Top 5 Leadership Books of 2015

Hone your management skills with the latest and greatest books on teams and leadership.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be revealing my picks for the best business books of the year, first by category and finally (on December 15th) the very best of the best.

So far, I’ve chosen the top 10 “start your own business” books. This column reveals the top 10 best books of the year for managers and team leaders.

1. Stand Out

Subtitle: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It

Author: Dorie Clark

5 Second Summary: In the past, success in the corporate world resulted from going along and getting along and doing what you were told. Today, success is only possible if you can successfully position yourself as uniquely valuable. This book helps you through that process.

Best Quote: “Whether you work inside a corporation or as an entrepreneur, today’s challenge is the same: how to add so much value to others that they fight to have you on their team. To succeed in today’s economy, you don’t have to be a worldwide superstar, but you do have to be deliberate about identifying the place where you want to make a contribution and start to show your ideas. The competition is fierce, but if you even begin to develop thought leadership, you’ll dramatically outpatient competitors, most of whom never even try.”

2. Team Genius

Subtitle: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations

Authors: Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone

5 Second Summary: This book reviews and explains the latest scientific research into how teams behave and perform. It shows that most of the conventional wisdom about teams is “truthy” rather than true. The book then describes how to apply science to create better teams.

Best Quote: “Teams are not strictly practical responses to immediate challenges and situations. Teams are at the heart of what it means to be human. Put another way, as human beings, we must form teams. It is encoded into our DNA. It has proved to be the critical factor in the rise civilization. The human drive to form teams is also a survival mechanism for individuals. The archaeological evidence suggests that even the earliest hominids always grouped together to live and hunt.”

3. Team of Teams

Subtitle: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

Author: General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman & Chris Fussell

5 Second Summary: At once inspiring and depressing, this book tells the story of the U.S.’s misbegotten attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan. In the process, it explains how even a large organization can pivot quickly when they’re committed strongly enough to accomplishing a difficult mission.

Best Quote: “The genesis of this story lies in the transformation of an elite military organization in the midst of the war. We could compare ourselves during that transition to a professional football team changing from what offensive system to another in the second quarter of a critical game, but the reality was far more drastic. The Task Force’s shift was actually more akin to that teams moving from playing football to basketball, and finding out habits and preconceptions have to be discarded along with pads and cleats.”

4. Serial Winner

Subtitle: 5 Actions to Create Your Cycle of Success

Author: Larry Weidel

5 Second Summary: The basic principles of success: 1) Move forward when you feel stuck, 2) Crush early doubts and give yourself the best shot of succeeding, 3) Overcome obstacles to win anyway, 4) Maintain your mental toughness until you cross the finish line, and 5) Avoid the winner’s trap and use the momentum of each win to achieve the next.

Best Quote: “Serial winners don’t let little, limiting things like doubt and uncertainty stand in their way. Lack of advantage doesn’t matter. The people who say, “you can’t” don’t matter. They focus more on what they want than on why they can’t have it, and then they decide to do what it takes to get it. Then they dive in.They see something they want-a promotion or two or three, a new career, their own business-and they make the decision to go for it. Then they make smaller decisions every day that keep them moving toward that goal, and the next one, and the next one.”

5. You Win in the Locker Room First

Subtitle: The 7 C’s to Build a Winning Team in Business, Sports, and Life

Author: Jon Gordon & Mike Smith

5 Second Summary: Describes how two extraordinary coaches transformed the Atlanta Falcons from a mediocre (at best) football team into a winning one and in the process shows how leaders can transform their own organizations using the same principles.

Best Quote: “Culture consists of the shared purpose, attitudes, values, goals, practices, behaviors, and habits that define a team or organization. Many coaches focus only on the culture shared by the players, but the fact is that everyone in an organization shapes the culture. To be successful, you need everyone in your organization thinking, believing, talking, and behaving in sync. You need everyone to be aligned with the same beliefs, expectations, behaviors, and habits. [We] learned quickly that the beliefs and behaviors of the past had to go and we needed to instill new ways of thinking and acting that everyone could follow.”

 

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