I periodically teach a half-day seminar in executive education programs for up-and-coming managers. It’s called: “So you want to be a CEO.”
And, from time to time, aspiring CEOs ask me for book recommendations—essential reading that can help propel them to the C-suite. The truth is this: Just like there’s no “magic bullet” for a successful workplace culture or success in life more generally, there is no single book that can turn a non-CEO into a chief executive. There are hundreds of books that should be essential reading, and many of them have nothing to do with business.
But, if I had to pick three as “first among equals,” they would need to be universally valuable across generations and regardless of specific moments in time. Having served as CEO of several companies over the last four decades, there are indeed a few books that have passed the test of time and proven to be useful over and over again. Here they are, for your reading pleasure:
The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus
Published in 1998 by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, staff editors of The Economist at the time, their bestseller is a compendium and commentary on the various contenders over the years for “management guru status.” The co-authors start with sociologist Peter Drucker and his book, Concept of the Corporation, a perennial contender for being the “Bible” on business management, before going into other formative texts. They finish dismissively with In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr.), among other underwhelming texts.
As a result, The Witch Doctors ends up being a valuable entry point into the world of business theory writing. Its method of compilation opens readers’ eyes to the good and bad in many examples of business writing, pushing people in other creative directions. What resonates with me is that Micklethwait and Wooldridge are appropriately skeptical about any “secret sauce” for success, since successful outcomes actually come from multifaceted processes that incorporate a wide range of best practices. They remain nuanced, steering clear of misleading generalizations, as do I.
If you want a broad understanding of the evolution in thinking about management (and how few ideas hold up over time), this one is required reading for that “meta” evolutionary view.
Work and the Nature of Man
My next choice—a Frederick Herzberg classic—falls in the space of motivating people. After all, at the heart of every successful CEO is a person who empowers others to accept a broad vision and then pursue it with sustained enthusiasm and proper judgement. Beyond strategy, the best CEOs lead by persuading people to follow them, without losing sight of themselves and their own personal interests.
In the motivational space, much has been written about increasing organizational productivity—how to get more out of the workforce through incentives and other factors. This includes B.F. Skinner’s idea of “positive reinforcement,” which provides a bedrock understanding of human nature. However, this sort of operant conditioning can and often does lead to utopian models that are authoritarian at heart and (rightly) cautioned in George Orwell’s 1984.
Work and the Nature of Man has proven to be visionary throughout my experiences in the C-suite, and it is supported by more contemporary work on high-performing cultures. Before diving into the entire book, it is best to read Herzberg’s summary piece in Harvard Business Review, still one of the most widely read in the publication’s history. He asks the question, “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?”
And Herzberg answers it correctly. Rather than focusing on praise, punishment, and even hard cash, the author urges employers to make work more meaningful and valued by those who produce its product. Successful CEOs make individuals feel seen and heard as individuals with their own unique thoughts, rewarding them via opportunities commensurate with their effort and bottom-line results.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
My last recommendation is from 1841, when journalist Charles Mackay first published his thoughts under the title, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The book was released in three volumes: “National Delusions,” “Peculiar Follies,” and “Philosophical Delusions.”
Especially for aspiring CEOs in industries involving finance, investments, and capital markets, Mackay’s work serves as a reminder of “forever think” traps—the magical thinking behind every boom, bubble, and bust. As the Scotsman suggests, every generation succumbs to delusions and crowds tend to get carried away. The book’s three volumes hint at the fact that popular delusions will always be with us, issuing a warning to managers to avoid buying into the latest collective madness.
From the Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble to Witch Mania and the Crusades, Mackay outlines the many downsides of groupthink and how it plays out in financial markets. It is so compelling that financial writer Michael Lewis included the financial mania volume in his own book, The Real Price of Everything: Rediscovering the Six Classics of Economics, as one of the six most important works of economics, alongside writings by Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes. That’s quite the company!
Happy reading. If you’re an aspiring CEO or just someone who feels the need to read, these three books won’t lead you astray.
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