Looking to improve your business in 2026? We polled our community of business leaders for their best recommendations for reading.
Whether you’re dedicated to creating better systems, healthier habits, and winning mindsets, or you’re charting a strategy for growing the company, navigating disruption, and scaling up, or you’re interested in creating a happier, more inclusive workplace, here are some leadership books to inspire you.
Creating Stronger Systems & Healthier Habits
Come Up For Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems & Tools to Stop Drowning in Work – Nick Sonnenberg
Is your team wishing there were more hours in the day to get everything done? Come Up for Air proposes a framework to help teams reduce unnecessary work and inefficiencies that prevent them from focusing on high-value work. By using the right tools in the right way, at the right time, Sonnenberg proposes solutions for teams to maximize their performance and reduce overwhelm, resulting in more output, less stress, and happier employees.
Recommended by Heather Lake, Customer Relationship Manager/Customer Success Manager, Gallery Systems: “Productivity insights from someone who has led an efficiency consulting business.”
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits – Verne Harnish
In Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish describes a set of growth habits embraced by fast-growth companies. These are habits that the author attached to Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller as he grew Standard Oil’s business. Among the habits that are explained in the book: Aligning the executive team, establishing a rhythm for communication throughout the business, identifying opportunities and obstacles through collecting ongoing employee input, frequently analyzing customer feedback, keeping core values and purpose alive in the organization, ensuring employees can articulate company strategy accurately, maintaining employee scoreboards, and visibility for company plans and performance.
Recommended by Niels Borneman, Director, Marketing, RouteVision: “When Harnish read the biography of John D. Rockefeller, it changed his life. He turned the insights he gained into a management framework for fast-growing companies, built on three core principles: priorities, data, and rhythm.”
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – Marshall Goldsmith
Harvard Business Review asked Goldsmith, “What is the most common problem faced by the executives that you coach?” Inside, he answers this question by discussing not only the key beliefs of successful leaders, but also the behaviors that hold them back. He addresses the fundamental problems that often come with success—and offers ways to attack these problems. Goldsmith outlines twenty habits commonly found in the corporate environment and provides a systematic approach to helping you achieve a positive behavior change.
Recommended by Ian Glenn, Group Leader, Vencora: “It’s an insightful guide that challenges conventional thinking and encourages meaningful change, showing how small behavioral adjustments can lead to lasting success.”
The One Thing – Gary Keller & Jay Papasan
Focus is the solution for people who want both more and less in their lives, say the authors of this book. People want less in the form of fewer distractions and less on their plates and want to be less distracted by a daily barrage of e-mails, texts, tweets, messages, and meetings. Meanwhile, the simultaneous demands of work and family are taking a toll. And what’s the cost? Second-rate work, missed deadlines, smaller paychecks, fewer promotions–and lots of stress. But people want more productivity, more income for a better lifestyle, more satisfaction from life, and more time for themselves, family, and friends. The One Thing offers suggestions for how to cut through the clutter, achieve better results in less time, build momentum toward goals, and master what matters.
Recommended by Jenny Hobbs, Group People Director, Omegro: “Guides leaders on how to prioritize and achieve results.”
Mastering a Winning Mindset
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Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Money and Defy the Odds – David Goggins
This autobiography tells the author’s journey from overcoming a difficult childhood to becoming a U.S. Armed Forces icon and extreme endurance athlete. A story of grit and embracing challenges, his story teaches readers how to unlock their potential by pushing past mental barriers, developing a growth mindset, and developing discipline and deep focus.
Recommended by Mathieu Hofert, Engineer Manager, Four Js: “A true story and a masterful lesson in continuous improvement and resilience.”
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness – Morgan Housel
Money―investing, personal finance, and business decisions―is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But doing well with money is about how you behave. In the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel shares stories that explore the different ways to think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.
Recommended by Mara Ghilardi, General Counsel, Modaxo: “An excellent book for understanding how emotions, biases, and personal experiences influence financial decisions and investment behavior.”
Watertight Marketing: The Proven Process for Seriously Scaleable Sales – Bryony Thomas
The Watertight Marketing methodology helps business leaders cut through hype, make a clear marketing plan, and take control to create consistent routes to customers, successfully scale their sales results, and significantly and sustainably increase their profits.
Recommended by Megan Hasenour, Marketing Manager, Solentra: “A must-read for both sales and marketing professionals in 2026. The book offers a clear, actionable framework for fixing the leaks in your funnel or pipeline and driving sustainable growth, equipping you with practical tools you can immediately apply within your business unit. If you want to future-proof your strategy and deliver measurable results, this is a book the book for you.”
Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long – David Rock
The advice in this book is told through the story of Emily and Paul, working parents in senior-level corporate and consulting careers. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task. In this book, we travel inside Emily and Paul’s brains as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they’re presented with, figure out how to prioritize it, organize it and act on it. Rock shows how it’s possible for Emily and Paul, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today’s overwhelming work environment but succeed in it and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.
Recommended by Dominique Ryffranck, Responsable Client/Account Manager, ExPretio: “Strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus, and working smarter all day long.”
The Infinite Game – Simon Sinek
How do we win a game that has no end? Finite games, like football or chess, have known players, fixed rules and a clear endpoint. The winners and losers are easily identified. But infinite games, like business or politics which have no finish line, or life itself, have players who come and go. The rules of an infinite game are changeable, while infinite games have no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers—only ahead and behind. Simon Sinek offers a framework for leading with an infinite mindset, enabling them to build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations and lead us into the future.
Recommended by Elijah Mattox, Revenue Operations Manager, Wynne Systems: “Great for reframing your thinking from focusing on competitors to focusing on what YOU are doing, as a company, and whether it stays true to your values. Less following the crowd to stay relevant; more leading the way with authenticity.”
Growth Strategy, Managing Disruption & Scaling Up
First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter – Michael Watkins
Transitions are a critical time for leaders, and moving into a new role can be one of the biggest challenges a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success. Whether you’re starting a new job, being promoted from within, embarking on an overseas assignment, or being tapped as CEO, this book offers a guide on how to manage.
Recommended by Kelly Chapman, Head of Marketing, Zelra: “In our business, where there is constant change, this book reminds you how to ‘start again’ in different scenarios, whether that’s stepping into a new business or a promotion.”
Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business – Tiffani Bova
Trying to find the one right move that will improve your business’s performance can feel overwhelming. But, as is laid out in Growth IQ, there are ten simple but easily misunderstood paths to growth, and a successful growth strategy can be boiled down to picking the right combination and sequence of these paths for your current context. Bova draws on her decades of experience and 30+ in-depth business stories to demonstrate the opportunities and pitfalls of each of the ten growth paths.
Recommended by Matthew McDonagh, Chief Growth Officer, Jones COO Group: “When growth stalls, the tendency is to try every growth strategy at once. The most successful companies sequence their growth moves deliberately. A key message is that growth and comfort never co-exist.”
Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… and Why The Rest Don’t – Verne Harnish
In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team expand on his analysis from his previous book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, by sharing practical tools and techniques for building an industry-leading business. These approaches have been honed from over three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives and helping them navigate the increasing complexities (and weight) that come with scaling up a venture.
Recommended by Peter Grant, Chief of Staff, Omegro: “Verne has done a great job of distilling best practices from thought leaders and 40+ books, and has a user manual for running and scaling a successful business. It has become the foundation for the development of our strategic plan within our portfolio. I love the balanced approach of taking care of people, strategy, execution, and cash—all the elements we consider important within Volaris and Omegro.”
Vibe Coding: Building Production Grade Software with GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond – Gene Kim and Steve Yegge
In this book, industry veterans reveal how vibe coding is transforming software development by leveraging the power of AI assistance. Drawing from decades of combined experience in software engineering and developer productivity, Yegge and Kim demonstrate how Vibe Coding enables developers to transform complex programming challenges into fluid conversations with GenAI, build ambitious projects faster while maintaining code quality, master the art of co-creating with an AI companion, break free from traditional programming constraints such as syntax and setup, and build confidently in multiple programming languages and frameworks.
Recommended by Ian Reay, AI Architect Lead, Volaris Consolidated: “It’s a book that is very popular right now in the software engineering circles and provides examples of how software engineering is changing.”
Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption – Geoffrey A. Moore
Zone to Win offers a practical manual to address the challenge large enterprises face when looking to add a new line of business to their established portfolio. Focused on spurring next-generation growth, guiding mergers and acquisitions, and embracing disruption and innovation, this book promises to help drive your company above and beyond its limitations, its definitions of success, and ultimately, its competitors.
Recommended by Peter Grant, Chief of Staff, Omegro: “The ‘Incubation Zone’ described in this book had a lot of alignment with our growth initiatives.”
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers – Geoffrey A. Moore
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore shows that in the technology adoption life cycle, there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.
Recommended by Danna Coulter, Marketing Manager, Trapeze Group: “Crossing the Chasm is a practical marketing playbook for leaders. Moore’s categories (visionaries, pragmatists, skeptics) show up in virtually every industry and at every scale, whether you’re selling software, championing a new feature, or driving organizational change. This book gave me a clear language for understanding adoption barriers, sharpening go-to-market strategy, and bridging the gap between innovation and delivering real, long-term value for customers.”
Also recommended by Matthew McDonagh, Chief Growth Officer, Jones COO Group: “The key to getting across the chasm is to target a very specific niche market where you can dominate and then use that as a beachhead to enter the mainstream.”
Creating Happiness and Inclusivity at Work
Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy – Mo Gawdat
In 2001, Mo Gawdat, Chief Business Officer at Google’s [X], realized that despite his success, he was desperately unhappy. A lifelong learner, he attacked the problem as an engineer would: examining all the provable facts and scrupulously applying logic. Eventually, his countless hours of research and science led him to an equation for permanent happiness—a unique engineering approach to happiness that blends neuroscience and positive psychology.
Recommended by Tim H., Senior Consultant, Holocentric:“Solve for Happy is an amazing book with applicable strategies. Mo Gawdat (author), former Chief Business Officer at Google’s [X], applies his superior logic and problem-solving skills to understand how the brain processes joy and sadness—and then he solves for happy.”
From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life – Arthur C. Brooks
A roadmap for finding purpose, meaning, and success as we age, from bestselling author, Harvard professor, and The Atlantic‘s happiness columnist Arthur Brooks. The book challenges readers to ask, “What can we do, starting now, to make our older years a time of happiness, purpose, and yes, success?” At the height of his career at the age of 50, Arthur Brooks embarked on a seven-year journey to discover how to transform his future from one of disappointment over aging and waning abilities into an opportunity for progress. From Strength to Strength is the result, a practical roadmap for the rest of your life.
Recommended by Paul Comfort, SVP – Business Development, Rod Jones Portfolio: “I read it this year, and it really pushed me to think differently about how we grow as leaders over time. Brooks lays out a practical, action-oriented roadmap for shifting from simply driving performance to building a more sustainable, purpose-filled career. It’s a great reminder that evolving our strengths isn’t about slowing down—it’s about focusing our energy where it has the greatest impact. I found it confirming and motivating, and I think others in the second half of their career would get a lot out of it too.”
The Gap and the Gain – Dan Sullivan
Most people, especially highly ambitious people, are unhappy because of how they measure their progress. We all have an ideal, ever-moving target that is always out of reach. When we measure ourselves against that ideal, we’re in what the authors call “the gap.” However, when we measure ourselves against our previous selves, we’re in “the gain.” If you’re finding that happiness eludes you no matter how much you’ve achieved, then learning this easy mindset shift will set you on a life-changing path to greater fulfillment and success.
Recommended by Gary Knaak, Chief Executive Officer, CaterTrax: “The gap is when you focus on what’s missing, not what’s present, so it feels like you’re never doing enough, even when you achieve a lot. The result is frustration, burnout, and feeling perpetually behind. The gain is when you measure backward by comparing where you are now to where you started. By documenting wins, learning, and progress, you feel gratitude and confidence from seeing how far you’ve come. The result: more motivation, resilience, and enjoyment of the journey.”
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men – Caroline Driado Perez
The book describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias in big data collection. The book points to examples of product designers using a “one-size-fits-all” approach to everything from pianos to cell phones to voice recognition software, when in fact this approach is designed to fit men. Cities prioritize men’s needs when designing public transportation, roads, and even snow removal, neglecting to consider women’s safety or unique responsibilities and travel patterns. And in medical research, women have largely been excluded from studies and textbooks, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated, and misdiagnosed. Built on hundreds of studies, this book will give you a new perspective on the world.
Recommended by Paula Horton, HR & Social Value Coordinator, Taranto Systems: “Really insightful about exposing data bias.”
