Five books that made me a better leader

Hi, everybody. I'm gonna share with you five particular books that have helped me become a better leader, better manager, better consultant, and to understand a little bit more about business, about leadership, about management. Now this was really tricky because the bookshelf over there, probably maybe 15 to 20 books that I wanted to to share with you today. We're not gonna have time for that. So I'm gonna do the five that as I'm looking through the bookshelf really jumped out.

But let's start with the first one. This one here by Richard Rumel. This is called good strategy, bad strategy. This is a good book. It gets cited all over the place, and it really is an interesting take on what a strategy is.

I'm not going to summarize the books on here, but what I will say is that if you're in any kind of strategic role, you're thinking about the future, you're thinking about how to direct and organize and orientate the organization. I mean, this is the map layer of the idea to value system. It's the strategic direction. Now it's a reasonably oldish book by some standards. I mean, was published in 2011, but inside is pure gold if you're working in strategic stuff.

It's one of those books where I've I've dog eared all of the corners of things that are interesting, and it's got little stories weaved in. And ultimately, at the end of the day, that strategy is about that future. It's about that orientation. The word strategy when we look at the origins of that word means to direct, to guide. A strategy should do that.

What a strategy isn't is the leader's personality codified into a document. It's not these short aphorisms and these manifesto, these positive sounding things like move fast, break things, destroy the competition. You've heard all of those. They don't help you make decisions when you're moving towards valuable outcomes. A strategy does that.

This is a very good book. Next up, The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker. This is definitely not a book about business. It's not a book about strategy. It's not a book about leadership.

But I always say, and there's an article on the website if you're interested, that the art of noticing is the art of leadership because leaders notice things. They spot gaps in the market, strategic things that might need to change or directions to move in or opportunities to open up. But leaders and managers also notice what's happening in the organization. They widen their awareness so they will be surprised less often. And what this means is they notice how work moves, how people come together, where problems accumulate, where process is failing the people who are doing the work.

They notice who's good at what, what strengths they've got, what ambitions and goals they have. They they take the time to understand that. Good managers and good leaders, they notice, they pay attention, and what they see, they then turn into changes, improvements, pivots, things that make the business better. And when we think about a role, particularly of leadership, it is to govern and understand and and look after the system that everybody is a part of. And you can't make that system better if you don't learn to notice.

And in this book, this is fundamentally a book about noticing through all of the senses that we have, to pay attention to the world that we often ignore as we're busy on our tasks and our mission and our goals and our objectives. But this is a book about slowing down. It is a book about looking. It is a book about paying attention, and with that can often come profound breakthroughs. The next book is one that I may as well have dipped in highlight fluid.

This is called Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith. Technically, this book is about service organizations, you know, where there's no physical product that you can touch, that you can give away samples of. This is about naming that, making it visible, selling the invisible. However, whether you're in a physical product, software, whatever, service orientated business, this is pure gold. Almost every page has something useful, insightful, challenging sometimes in the way that we think about business.

This is a reasonably old book first published in 1999. It is still relevant. It is still spot on when it comes to improving businesses, thinking about marketing, thinking about how we treat people in an organization, thinking about planning and getting into action. Loads and loads of really, really good advice. I was literally just flicking through trying to find a few things to to mention, but there's just so many of them.

So I'll keep it brief and short. There's this one here that says assume your service is bad. It can't hurt and it will force you to improve it. Now I think a lot of companies should pay attention to that sentence. This really is a genuinely brilliant book and I think if you read this, I think you will find many, many nuggets of wisdom, ideas, thoughts, inspiration that you can directly bring into your organization no matter what level you work in, no matter what size of the organization, and no matter which industry you work in.

Really good book. So the fourth book on here will be no surprise for anyone who's seen my creative soul projects companion channel or many of articles on cultivatorsmanagement.com. Growing a business by Paul Hawken. This is a book that I reread all the time. Every year I'm dipping in and out of this book.

And what's interesting about a good book is that you have changed since you last read it. And when you go through a book again, you tend to pull out different things or things you may have highlighted now mean something subtly different to you. And that to me is the mark of a good book. I gift this book to anybody I'm working with, anyone who wants to improve a business or grow a business, particularly solo creators or entrepreneurs or people in small organizations. It's about leadership.

It's about management. It's about treating people as people. It is about owning mistakes and learning from them. It is about fun, being an early warning system. There is just so much stuff in here.

It's even, you know, goes into basic, economics and finance models and understanding the numbers when you're first starting out. Now, of course, some of this might be a bit dated and other things have replaced it. But honestly, this is the book that I reread every single year. And every year, it helps me understand myself, the business, and how to grow it. And then finally, the last book is a phenomenally good book that many people have never heard of, and it's by a guy called John Seddon.

This book is genius. It's called I want you to cheat, and it's all about service and quality in organizations, but it's just full of nuggets of wisdom. One of the core ideas in here is that when we set these sort of standard operating things for customer service, people for example, that we're only allowed to be on the call for so long, that we've got to go through this checklist, that we've got to follow the rules, that actually that leads to poor quality service. And poor quality service ends up generating more cost, more demand, more failures, more problems in the organisation because we're not dealing with things effectively, efficiently and properly at the start. And the idea is that if you break those rules and you do what is required to help the customer succeed, because that is the purpose of an organisation, to help customers.

No customers, no money coming in, no business. And his argument is that if we often break many of those rules, in other words, we cheat, then actually we do more good for the organization, but we get reprimanded by leaders and managers who want simple, easy compliance and policies to govern everything. And actually in growing a business Paul Hawken talks about this too, where when we treat the customer as a commodity, as somebody to rattle through a process, and we don't do what's right by the customer, and our purpose is to serve the customers, then we fundamentally damage the organization. Now John Seddon has many other books, including a really good one, which I nearly put in this list called Freedom from Command and Control. He breaks down many of the things in these books and on his website and through his work that many organizations think is sacred like policies, targets, measures to some extent.

When we're measuring the wrong things, actually drive the wrong behaviors. And instead what he looks for is delivering on our purpose. I often say that this is really John Seddon's work and this book particularly reminds me of Edward Deming's work in manufacturing, but brought in to the service organization. And it is a phenomenally good book. I encourage you to read this one and not think very differently about how you're doing improvements, how you're measuring success and how you're organizing and orientating your business around its purpose.

Now they are the five books that I picked from the bookshelf to help leaders, managers, and anyone who's interested in growing their career and improving the business. No doubt, there are many, many hundreds more that I could have included. And if you think there's one that I have absolutely fundamentally missed, let me know kindly in the comments, and I might do another one of these with five more books in the future. And with that, you take care of yourselves. Bye bye.