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08.01.25
First Look: Leadership Books for August 2025
HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in August 2025 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.
The brutal truth: most startups and scale-ups don't fail because of bad products. They fail because they never figure out how to grow fast―and profitably. Some chase market share at all costs, burning cash on customers who won't pay enough to sustain the business. Others over-monetize too soon, pushing away the customers they need to reach scale. Still others obsess over customer loyalty, missing larger markets and monetization potential. And then there are those who assume a great product will sell itself, only to realize too late that pricing, packaging, positioning and value selling matter just as much. The true winners take a different approach. They adopt a Profitable Growth Mindset, refusing to choose between market expansion and monetization―instead, they dominate both. Instead of relying on instinct or momentum.
What if you could summon genuine confidence anytime you need it? Being happier, building better relationships, overcoming fear: the missing link between you and everything you want to achieve is self-confidence. The problem? Confidence is hard to build, and even when we do, it often feels temporary and forced. After years of research and working with over 250,000 individuals, Juan Bendaña uncovered the four myths about confidence that actually cause and reinforce self-doubt. Confidence is not linked to genetics, extraversion, insecurities, or competence. To combat these myths, Juan Bendaña developed the Confidence Cycle, a repeatable flywheel that will help you gain and sustain confidence in every aspect of life through three key decisions: Decision #1: Micro-Energy, Decision #2: Micro-Courage, Decision #3: Micro-Action
Great leaders don’t just see the path ahead—they see themselves clearly first; mastering self-awareness is the difference between thriving at the top and blindly leading toward failure. Great leaders aren’t just skilled strategists—they’re deeply self-aware. In Aware, Les Csorba, reveals how identifying blind spots and having the courage to address them can determine the success or failure of a leader and their organization. Drawing from decades of experience as a Partner with Heidrick & Struggles, the worldwide recruiting and leadership consulting firm advising top executives and Fortune 500 corporate boards—and his time serving as Special Assistant to the President in the White House —Les shares how self-awareness, paired with bold action, separates exceptional leaders from those who fall short.
Be yourself. Be fully present. Be in the moment. This is a message we hear constantly. While this may be beneficial some of the time, the biggest obstacle to making wiser decisions that actually drive lasting success is ourselves. Being fully immersed in our own limited point of view biases our decisions toward defending our previous actions and maintaining our self-image. We need to exit our me-here-and-now self and get an outside perspective that sees us and the situation we are in objectively. We need a coach. This book shows us how to become our own coach by using a mental technique called psychological distancing.
Tap into your hidden intelligence and transform your life. How are some people so much smarter than the rest of us? Where do visionary creatives and savvy decision-makers like Vincent van Gogh, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Maya Angelou, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Wayne Gretzky, Warren Buffett, and William Shakespeare get their extraordinary mental abilities? In 2021, researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative, renowned for collaborations with NASA, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, announced they had the answer. They named it Primal Intelligence. And they published scientific proof that Primal Intelligence was impossible for computers—but could be strengthened in humans. Intrigued, U.S. Army Special Operations developed Primal training for its most classified units. The Army then authorized trials on civilian entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, managers, salesforces, coaches, teachers, investors, and NFL players. Their leadership and innovation improved significantly. They coped better with change and uncertainty. They experienced less anger and anxiety. Finally, the Army provided Primal training to college and K-12 classrooms. It produced substantial effects in students as young as eight.
   
“You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well. And I mean that last "well" in both senses. You have to be good at reading, and read good things.” — Paul Graham, Y Combinator co-founder
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:34 AM
07.31.25
Leading Thoughts for July 31, 2025
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter on cultivating a mental focus: “As Al continues to advance and become more integrated into our working lives, it’s likely to further exacerbate the challenges posed by our already-distracted and data-filled environment. This new reality needs—no, demands—a proactive stance. Leaders who want to be successful today and tomorrow must commit to a more rigorous practice of cultivating inner stillness. They need to develop a deliberate, meaningful approach to managing the inner game of leadership—which starts with the mind. Actively cultivating a mind that is clearer and more spacious prevents leaders from being consumed by this relentless flow of data and enables them to make wiser, more informed decisions.” Source: More Human: How the Power of AI Can Transform the Way You Lead Jennifer Moss on eating lunch together: “Working remotely doesn’t have to be a barrier to building relational energy. Just take lunch with you and away from your desk. Call a friend or meet a friend. Go outside if you can. Eating lunch with others pays off. One study found that participants who ate together were more cooperative and trusting compared to those who did not. Eating with others also improved tenure and enhanced overall work group performance.” Source: Why Are We Here? Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:09 PM
LeadershipNow 140: July 2025 Compilation
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:26 AM
07.24.25
Leading Thoughts for July 24, 2025
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Greg Satell on change: “To grow, you have to connect, and the more you connect, the more central you become. The more central you become, the more power you have. And with enough power, you can bring change about.” Source: Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra on changing early and often: “No one likes change, so you need to create a rhythm of change. Think of it as applying ‘heart paddles’ to the organization. The average lifetime of an organization in 1935 was ninety years, in 2015 it was eighteen years. You have to ask the question: ‘Why should we exist ten years from now?’ It’s an existential issue to change enough, regularly enough. If you’re not doing this, you’re not going to be around.” Source: CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:44 PM
07.17.25
Leading Thoughts for July 17, 2025
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Adam Galinsky on encouraging the right result: “We often focus on the person, and what they generally do wrong. The next time you find someone repeatedly failing or find yourself being repeatedly annoyed at someone, ask yourself a few questions: Is the current situation setting them up to fail, or setting me up to be annoyed? What can I do to set this person up for success?” Source: Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others Mark Miller on working on the future: “The best leaders are comfortable being uncomfortable. We should always be working on problems bigger than our calendar and our checkbook can support. This is where we’ll find personal growth and new frontiers for our organization. The reward you receive for solving a problem is a bigger problem to solve.” Source: Uncommon Greatness: Five Fundamentals to Transform Your Leadership Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:14 AM
07.11.25
8 Beliefs That Will Make You Limitless
UNDERSTANDING how people’s minds work gives us a foundation to make change happen. Sometimes we get stuck until we find the insight or the perspective that makes all the difference. In The Difference That Makes the Difference: NLP and the Science of Positive Change, Josh Davis and Greg Prosmushkin present eight shifts in thinking that can be the difference to move change forward. The authors offer these tools derived from Neurolinguistic Programming to help people apply them in a positive way to help lift people up. 1. How We Experience the World Is Not the Same as Reality We don’t see reality. We see our perception of reality. Our worldview—our expectations—distort reality. We see what we think is important. “What we experience is not reality, it is instead a version of reality that serves our needs and is heavily influenced by what is going on in our minds.” People don’t react to reality—they react to their experience of reality. Those two things are not the same. So, if you want to understand someone or help them change, rather than trying to understand reality, you should try to understand how they experience reality. Doing so reveals how people get stuck and opens wide the possibilities for change. Once you learn how someone experiences the world, it becomes clear what to try changing in order to help them. You are then in a position to find the difference that makes the difference for them. This means that most of our limitations are of our own making. Your options and possibilities grow when you expand and enrich your mental model or worldview. Begin by presuming that you don’t know everything about yours or others’ mental model, and change will become easier. 2. Why Not Me? When you believe you can’t, you behave in a way to bring about the thing you don’t want. Believing that you can is a strong predictor that you will. How differently would you behave if you thought that if they can do it, it is possible for you as well? Believing that if it’s possible for someone, it’s possible for you is not everything, but it can be life-changing. Life is magical, but not magic. But taking on this belief is often critical in leading to these outcomes. Believing you can doesn’t mean that you can do anything and everything. But you can learn what approach others that have gone before you have approached what you are trying to do and adjust your mental model accordingly. 3. All I Need Is Already Within Me Do I have what it takes to do what I want to do? Progress to what we want always begins with the first step, no matter where you are. Focus on the process, not the result. If we believe that we don’t have what it takes, we will not make the changes to move us in the direction we want to go in. All we need to begin is already within us. Research has now also shown that the effects of this belief are reliable-when people believe they have the resources to change, they are significantly more likely to do so. This is true whether it is a personal or professional change. And the opposite has been found, too—even when people do have the resources, if they believe they don’t, they don’t take action and don’t change their situation. When we focus on what we have rather than what we don’t have, we can make the first step. 4. There’s No Failure, Only Feedback Too often, we take failure as a sign that we are not up to the task. We begin to doubt ourselves. We need to reframe our experience. It’s not failure. It’s feedback. Another step to get you where you want to go. We learn more completely when we see failure as feedback. Whenever we put ourselves out there and try to do something new, we run the risk that we may not do it well. People who choose to use a feedback frame process information about how they performed differently from those who use a failure frame. Even before one second has gone by after getting information about performance, the differences can be seen in the brain. When using a feedback frame, our brains give more attention to the information coming in and use it to improve future performance. Whereas when people see the information as judgment about themselves or whether they failed, then the brain does not capture or use the information coming in as effectively. 5. How My Message Landed Matters More Than What I Meant When communication fails, it’s feedback that you need to course-correct and try again. Fortunately, there is a useful solution for communicating well even when your intended message may not be getting through as planned—presume that the meaning of your communication is the response you get. Take that responsibility and you will take the right steps to find out what you are communicating and ultimately get the right messages across. 6. If At First I Don’t Succeed, I Must Try Something Else This advice is based on the idea that “in any system, the element with the most flexibility exerts the most influence. Most of the time, the person who is able to adapt to the situation on the ground is the one who gets their needs met.” Or perhaps you can put it this way: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. (No, Einstein didn’t say that.) To be flexible, you need to keep the end goal in mind and think through these steps: 1. Clarify your ultimate need—your why.
7. Assume Good Intentions Get curious, not judgmental. Thinking we know everything puts a lid on our learning and effectiveness. “Whenever you encounter resistance, get curious about the other person’s positive intention first.” People most often do not do bad things for the purpose of doing bad things; they have a positive intention they are trying to work through. This doesn’t justify bad behavior, but if you can find a way to get at the positive intention, you have a chance to change those bad behaviors. Ask yourself, “Why was that important to them to say or do?” as many times as it takes to get the answer. 8. If I Knew Then What I Knew Then Dwelling on past mistakes and criticizing yourself only drains your energy and distracts you from forward momentum. This is true for ourselves and others: “People behave in the best ways they know how and make the best choices they can, given their mental model of the world.” Behavior makes sense in the context of the mental model in use. If we have unconditional positive regard for ourselves and others, we can have compassion in any context. The authors go on to provide 10 tools for understanding someone’s mind and then how to use this information to lead change in our own lives and those of others. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 06:54 AM
07.10.25
Leading Thoughts for July 10, 2025
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Margie Warrell on courage: “The biggest barrier standing between you and your most inspiring life and legacy is not external. It’s you. Dismantling that barrier begins with deciding to focus on what you want—on your boldest vision and highest good. While life may throw a few curve balls your way, the decisions in your life, not the conditions of your life, are what will ultimately shape the person you become.” Source: The Courage Gap: 5 Steps to Braver Action Joshua Medcalf and Lucas Jadin on mental resilience: “But when your mind tells you to quit, I’ve learned that you are just scratching the surface of your potential. You have so much left. If you can handle the voice of fear, you will find levels of grit, determination, and strength you didn’t know existed.” Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:10 AM
07.07.25
13 Habits of Highly Successful Risk-Takers
WE all take risks every day, but some people take it to a whole new level. These people make calculated risks. It requires a different mindset. In One the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Nate Silver explains what that entails: 1. Successful risk-takers are cool under pressure. They don’t try to be heroes, but they can execute when the chips are down. It doesn’t matter how well you execute in everyday situations—you’ll never reach the top of your craft if you choke when the pressure is on. Don’t try to be a hero-just do your job. 2. Successful risk-takers have courage. They’re insanely competitive and their attitude is: bring it on. 3. Successful risk-takers have strategic empathy. They put themselves in their opponent’s shoes. 4. Successful risk-takers are process-oriented, not results-oriented. They play the long game. But the long run can take a long time indeed—so in the meantime, we focus on our process. 5. Successful risk-takers take shots. They are explicitly aware of the risks they’re taking—and they’re comfortable with failure. But successful risk-takers are perpetually in search of +EV [expected value] opportunities and willing to pull the trigger. They don’t come along all that often. We probably don’t want everyone in society taking long-shot wagers. But we do want some people willing to risk everything on bets that can have a huge payoff to society. 6. Successful risk-takers take a raise-or-fold attitude toward life. They abhor mediocrity, and they know when to quit. The riskiest course of action is oftentimes just remaining passive. 7. Successful risk-takers are prepared. They make good intuitive decisions because they’re well trained—not because they “wing it.” Training, ironically, is often the best preparation to handle the situations that you don’t train for. 8. Successful risk-takers have selectively high attention to detail. They understand that attention is a scarce resource and think carefully about how to allocate it. The one thing you don’t want is to be consumed by the stakes of the mission; that’s a waste of bandwidth. You need your full attention on where you are and what you can do to help it to ensure it’s going right… and adapt and adjust if it starts to not go right. 9. Successful risk-takers are adaptable. They are good generalists, taking advantage of new opportunities and responding to new threats. As the world gets more complicated, it’s generally the generalists who rule the roost. They are more likely to adapt successfully to the unknown. 10. Successful risk-takers are good estimators. They are Bayesians, comfortable quantifying their intuitions and working with incomplete information. You also have to recognize that—as an outgrowth of Bayes’ theorem, which works by revising your probabilistic beliefs as you collect more information—your estimates will become more precise as you collect more data. But sometimes your edge comes from being willing to act on a relatively crude estimate to take advantage of an opportunity when other people are still mired in the fact-finding stage. 11. Successful risk-takers try to stand out, not fit in. They have independence of mind and purpose. 12. Successful risk-takers are conscientiously contrarian. They have theories about why and when the conventional wisdom is wrong. So be a conscientious contrarian—look for flaws in people’s incentives rather than their intelligence—and then seek out a place where your own incentives are well-aligned with your goals. 13. Successful risk-takers are not driven by money. They live on the edge because it’s their way of life. The physical risk-takers I spoke with also seemed to be motivated by some intrinsic desire to take risk and expressed a kinship with others who feel the same way. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:17 AM
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