136 of the best articles on leadership worth reading again
Hoping to fulfill my 2019 resolution to “read more,” I sought out book, podcast and article recommendations from basically everyone I know.
I got a few awesome recommendations back, and a ton of terrible/questionable ones.
Unfortunately, the quality of response was my fault. I needed to ask better questions eg:
What have you reread this year?
What articles have changed how you look at/think about something important to you?
What resources have had the biggest impact on your personal/professional growth?
What have you read or listened to that you would recommend to someone who is trying to build a “best places to work” kind of company?
In asking these questions to myself, I parsed through hundreds of things that I’ve read, pulling out articles, talks, podcasts and tweetstorms that I’ve referred back to and shared this year and organized them for your reading/thinking pleasure.
Choose a category to jump in to resources organized by category, tagged by reading time, and linked to each author’s Twitter handle so you can follow any of particular interest. And bookmark this page - I’ll update it monthly.
articles about leadership and growth
"Typically when the leader of an organization fails to scale with it, they are left in place, while some aspects of the role are shifted away. As a result, it's often the case that any manager's failure to scale with the company can unintentionally cram down an entire organization's career growth." - Growing with your company, Will Larson
articles about leadership and finance
“The tempting thing to do is just keep plugging away. You avoid looking at the financial forecast you shared with your investors, in the hope that they won’t think about it either; and if they do, then you draw on your reserves of optimism to come up with good reasons why you’ll catch up. But that catch-up is much harder than it looks.” - How to run a startup that’s running out of cash, Tim Jackson
articles about leadership and culture
“Many people confuse leverage and efficiency. They are different. Efficiency is fixing a desired output and minimizing the effort to achieve it. We are not an efficiency company. We are a leverage company. For a fixed amount of effort, how can you maximize your impact? This question is your guiding light. In everything you do, figure out how to multiply the impact you have by 10x.” - Carta 101, Henry Ward
articles about leadership and strategy
"Deep uncertainty merits deep questions, and the answers aren’t necessarily tied to a fixed date in the future. Where do you want to have impact? What it will take to achieve success? How will the organization evolve to meet challenges on the horizon? These are the kinds of deep, foundational questions that are best addressed with long-term planning." - How to do strategic planning like a futurist (HBR), Amy Webb
articles about leadership and decision making
"The primary benefit of a premortem is to identify inherent weaknesses in a plan or investment thesis before it is implemented. premortems usually surface potential problems that had not occurred (or were not identified) to other members of the team, especially to the team leader." Rendering a powerful tool flaccid: the misuse of premortems on wall street, Cary Klein, Paul D. Sonkin, Paul Johnson
articles about leadership and hiring
“In the early days of Amazon, Bezos famously said, “I’d rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.” This takes incredible discipline. It’s very tempting to change your hiring criteria or lower your standards if no one is meeting the bar. Yet standing your ground at this young business stage is particularly critical.” - How to hire like Jeff Bezos, Walter Chen
articles about leadership and personal development
"How would I approach my work differently if focused on growth and engagement, and if I measured eras not in equity and IPOs but instead in decades?" - A forty year career, Will Larson
team development
"Your job in a 1:1 is to give the smallest voice a chance to be heard, and I start with a question: “How are you?”" - The update, the vent and the disaster, rands (Michael Loop)
diversity and inclusion
"When it comes to hiring, many companies are implementing diversity quotas. However, it's unclear how effective they are, what hidden costs they might have, and if they’re necessary to achieve more diverse and inclusive workplaces." - Should tech companies use quotas to increase diversity and inclusion?, Lynne Tye
customer success
"After decades of watching great companies fail, we’ve come to the conclusion that the focus on correlation—and on knowing more and more about customers—is taking firms in the wrong direction. What they really need to home in on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what we’ve come to call the job to be done." - Know your customers jobs to be done (HBR), Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan
writing
"Style is a small part of writing well. Most of writing is thinking clearly. If you can think clearly, you can find something to say. You see, this guide is a ruse: its secondary goal is teaching you critical thinking." - Writing well, Julian Shapiro
articles about leadership and time management
Deep work, if made the centerpiece of your knowledge work schedule, generates three key benefits:
Continuous improvement of the value of your work output.
An increase in the total quantity of valuable output you produce.
Deeper satisfaction (aka., “passion”) for your work.
- Knowledge workers are bad at working, and here’s what to do about it, Cal Newport
case studies
"Since the day Costco went public in December of 1985, investors have complained that the company has been “too generous” with its customers and employees. They’ve called for higher markups on goods, steeper prices, and reduced benefits for workers.
But Costco has always insisted that their policies aren’t just altruistic — they’re good for business: By sticking to their principles, stock has gone up 387% since 2000." - How Costco gained a cult following (The Hustle), Zackary Crockett
future of work
“Lack of confidence leads to anxiety inducing existential questions. Who am I? Why am I here? What value am I even delivering?
All of this stuff gets in the way of actually delivering value, validating the need to ask these questions in a dizzying catch 22 and putting you at risk of quitting before you ever really get started.” - How to get better at working remote, Haley Bryant
what's missing?
The more I write, the more I read, the less I know. It’s awesome. Share your favorite articles below.