10 Books You Should Read This Summer 2024

SUMMER is here.

The summer is a perfect time to explore new ideas and perspectives to challenge your thinking and expand your potential.

Create a summer reading plan. Try a book you usually don’t pick up. Wally Bock offers his advice on this here. Here are ten suggestions for books released this year to inspire you and help grow your leadership.

  Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg - (February 2024)

Come inside a jury room as one juror leads a starkly divided room to consensus. Join a young CIA officer as he recruits a reluctant foreign agent. And sit with an accomplished surgeon as he tries, and fails, to convince yet another cancer patient to opt for the less risky course of treatment. In Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg blends deep research and his trademark storytelling skills to show how we can all learn to identify and leverage the hidden layers that lurk beneath every conversation. (Blog Post)

  Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict by William Ury - (February 2024)

In Possible, Ury argues conflict is natural. In fact, we need more conflict, not less—if we are to grow, change, evolve and solve our problems creatively. While we may not be able to end conflict, we can transform it—unleashing new, unexpected possibilities. With this groundbreaking book, international negotiator William Ury shares a new “path to possible”—time-tested practices that will help readers unlock their power to constructively engage and transform conflict. (Blog Post)

  How Leaders Learn: Master the Habits of the World's Most Successful People by David Novak with Lari Bishop - (June 2024)

When you put learning at the center of everything you do, you grow your career, your leadership, your relationships, and your joy and fulfillment in life. But even for people who are naturally curious and interested in solving problems, being an effective learner who can turn their learning into action takes insight and practice. David Novak shows you how to master active learning. This compilation of wisdom and practical habits from Novak's life and from some of the most successful leaders in the world—CEOs from many industries, military and political leaders, sports greats, experts, and coaches—is your active-learning practice manual.

  The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth by Ilya Strebulaev and Alex Dang - (May 2024)

Inspired by venture capitalists’ unique way of thinking, The Venture Mindset offers a transformative playbook for delivering results in a rapidly changing world from a top Stanford professor and a technology executive. Venture capitalists are known for their extraordinary ability to spot opportunities. They know how to identify emerging trends, how to bring new industries into being, and when to hold them and when to fold. Their unique mindset has made them the force behind world-changing companies such as Amazon, Google, Moderna, SpaceX, and Zoom. Combining their insight and extensive experience, they present nine distinct principles that will help you make better decisions, transform your business, and achieve remarkable results, no matter your industry. (Blog Post)

  Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr and Peter Ziebelman - (July 2024)

A radical set of new ideas for how entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate leaders can use the pattern-breaking mindset to dominate the future. Pattern-breaking success, the authors, demands a different mindset and actions to harness developments others miss or that may, at first, seem crazy. Pattern Breakers is filled with firsthand storytelling about initial interactions with some of the most transformative start-ups of recent times. Maples and Ziebelman vividly illustrate an unexpected world where chaos is welcome, naysayers are a positive signal, movements galvanize believers—but one that ultimately change the future. They challenge us to rethink how to transcend the ordinary and achieve the extraordinary.

  The Way of the Champion: Pain, Persistence, and the Path Forward by Paul Rabil / Foreword by Bill Belichick - (May 2024)

The Way of The Champion is the synthesis of everything Paul Rabil learned on his path to becoming one of the greatest lacrosse players of all time. But this is not merely a sports book. It is a guide to embodying a champion's mindset—in sports, in business, and in relationships. According to Rabil, “No one is born to be a champion. It can only be earned—through equal parts philosophy, execution, and sheer determination. I've won and lost championships, business deals, and relationships. I've learned that our best moments come after we've faced our most devestating defeats—when we choose to rise with unwavering resolve. That's the way of the champion."

  High Road Leadership: Bringing People Together in a World That Divides by John C. Maxwell - (May 2024)

John C. Maxwell, tackles the problem of our divided world in his latest book High Road Leadership. “Today it is causing people to fall—into disputes, frustration, anger, and despair. His solution is to expose the problems of taking the low and middle roads when interacting with others and teach people how to instead take the high road. Leaders who practice high road leadership value all people, do the right things for the right reasons, take accountability for their actions, and place people above their own agenda. Maxwell teaches the principles and practices of high-road leadership that can increase anyone’s influence and help them make their world a better place.

  The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance by Ashley Goodall - (May 2024)

Drawing on two decades spent leading HR organizations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall reveals why change is not the same as improvement, and how, by prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), by using real words (rather than corporate-speak), by sharing secrets (not mission statements), by fixing only the things that are truly broken (instead of moving fast and breaking everything in sight, and more, leaders at every level can create the stability that people need to thrive.

  Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers by Barbara Kellerman - (March 2024)

Nothwithstanding her personal opinions, Leadership from Bad to Worse is a valuable look at how leadership that is bad, invariably, inexorably, gets worse—unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or slowed. The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, as opposed to hasty. But once bad burrows in, it digs in. It digs in deeper and then deeper, making it difficult finally to extract or excise without getting rid of whoever and whatever is involved. Knowing that bad leadership can be checked before it corrupts is knowing that bad and then worse can be, if not completely precluded, then sometimes short-circuited.

  Extraordinary Transformation: An Entrepreneurial Blueprint for Leaders Who Seek Transformational Growth in Any Organization by Nido Qubein - (May 2024)

Many business leaders have repeatedly asked Nido Qubein to chronicle how a small college in North Carolina rose to national attention and grew substantially in spite of the Great Recession of 2008 and the coronavirus in 2020. The author demonstrates his respect for the academy as he leads his team to nurture a God, family, and country university focused on providing the perfect balance between intellectual discovery and practical life skills. You'll find a long list of useful strategies that can be successfully implemented in any enterprise and you'll find yourself thinking differently about some processes and preparing distinctively for some new initiatives.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:57 AM
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