First Look: Leadership Books for October 2022

HERE’S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in October 2022 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke

Business leaders, with millions of dollars down the drain, struggle to abandon a new app or product that just isn’t working. Governments, caught in a hopeless conflict, believe that the next tactic will finally be the one that wins the war. And in our own lives, we persist in relationships or careers that no longer serve us. Why? According to Annie Duke, in the face of tough decisions, we’re terrible quitters. And that is significantly holding us back. In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold em, and when to fold em, that will save you time, energy, and money.

Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company by Nicolai J Foss and Peter G Klein

It’s tempting to be seduced by futurist fantasies where every company has the culture of a startup, and where employees in wacky, whimsical office settings, liberated from hierarchies and bosses that oppress them, are the foundation for breakthrough performance. “Get real,” warn Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein. These fads ironically lead to micromanaging and, often, to disaster. Companies and societies, they show, need authority and hierarchy to coordinate work, including creative work. And, counterintuitively, they illustrate how the creative use of authority and hierarchy helps companies to be more agile and flexible, enabling educated, motivated people and teams to thrive. And not a moment too soon: they provide evidence that global challenges such as the proliferation of artificial intelligence, economic disruption, empowered knowledge workers, and black swan events such as the pandemic actually make hierarchy and the job of the manager more important than ever.

Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information by Paul F. Magnone, Christopher J. Frank and Oded Netzer

Agile decision making is imperative as you lead in a data-driven world. Amid streams of data and countless meetings, we make hasty decisions, slow decisions, and often no decisions. Uniquely bridging theory and practice, Decisions Over Decimals breaks this pattern by uniting data intelligence with human judgment to get to action – a sharp approach the authors refer to as Quantitative Intuition (QI). QI raises the power of thinking beyond big data without neglecting it and chasing the perfect decision while appreciating that such a thing can never really exist. Successful decision-makers square critical thinking with open-mindedness by blending information, intuition, and experience.

When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them by Julia Boorstin

Yes, women faced massive social and institutional headwinds, and struggled with double standards and what psychologists call “pattern matching.” Yet those who thrived, Boorstin found, shared key commonalities that made them uniquely equipped to lead, grow businesses, and navigate crises. They were highly adaptive to change, deeply empathetic in their management style, and much more likely to integrate diverse points of view into their business strategies, filling voids that their male counterparts had overlooked for generations. By utilizing those strengths, they had invented new business models, disrupted industries, and made massive profits along the way. Featuring new interviews with Katrina Lake, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jenn Hyman, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Lena Waithe, Shivani Siroya, Julia Collins, and more, When Women Lead is a radical blueprint for the future of business, and our world at large.

Irresistible: The Seven Secrets of the World’s Most Enduring, Employee-Focused Organizations by Josh Bersin

In this leadership book, renowned industry analyst Josh Bersin introduces a new way to think about organizational design, employee engagement, and employee development. Distilled from decades of research and management theory into seven practical yet profound management principles, Bersin outlines how business leaders can create enduring companies that thrive with improved customer satisfaction, employee retention, and business agility. Leaders of irresistible companies understand that by unleashing the power of the human spirit, their companies can go faster and farther than their competitors by empowering people and creating employee-centric cultures. If you can make your company—large or small—irresistible, your employees will contribute, innovate, and grow more than you thought possible.

Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn

We all want great ideas, but few actually understand how they’re born. Innovation doesn’t come from a sprint or a hackathon–it’s a result of maximizing ideaflow. Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn of Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “d.school”) offer a proven strategy for coming up with great ideas by yourself or with your team, and quickly determining which are worthy. Perhaps you have experienced low ideaflow. Have you been in that quiet conference room, with a half-filled whiteboard, and an unmet business target?. With the proven system in this book, entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders will learn how to tap into surprising and valuable ideas on demand and fill the creative pipeline with breakthrough ideas.