Bob Iger, chief executive officer of Walt Disney Co., speaks during the unveiling of Star Wars: ... [+]
If you’re looking for a book to give the aspiring CEO on your holiday list, there are plenty of new titles to consider. These four are among the best I’ve read this year, and they’ve each hit best-seller lists. They are written by successful CEOs and billionaires who share the lessons they’ve learned along their extraordinary journeys.
Spanning industries from high-tech to healthcare and from entertainment to finance, these four books give readers an inside look at what it takes to reach the top of any profession—and how to inspire teams when they get there.
The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger
Bob Iger is the widely admired CEO of the Walt Disney Company. In his book, The Ride of a Lifetime, Iger traces his career from a $150-a-week production assistant to the most powerful leader in entertainment.
Iger concludes the book with ten principles that he says are necessary for true leadership. Optimism is number one. “Even in the face of difficult choices and less than ideal outcomes, an optimistic leader does not yield to pessimism. Simply put, people are not motivated or energized by pessimists,” Iger writes.
Iger’s principles of leadership also include courage (“the foundation of risk-taking”), focus, and decisiveness, curiosity, fairness, and thoughtfulness, which Iger defines as “taking the time to develop informed opinions.” He also writes about authenticity, integrity and a principle Iger calls the relentless pursuit of perfection. “If you believe that something can be made better, put in the effort to do it,” Iger advises.
What It Takes by Stephen Schwarzman
Schwarzman is the co-founder and CEO of Blackstone, a firm that invests in hundreds of companies around the world. Schwarzman devotes an entire chapter of his book to his personal mantra: Go Big. According to Schwarzman, leaders who aspire to become great must have lofty goals and pursue them relentlessly.
“It’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one. So choose one with the potential to be huge,” he writes. Schwarzman tells a story from the early days of starting Blackstone. Schwarzman wanted to raise $1 billion for his first fund. His co-founder said $50 million was more realistic. They raised $850 million. Go big. That’s what it takes.
Learning to Lead by Ron Williams
Over his ten year tenure as Aetna’s CEO, Ron Williams transformed the struggling health insurance firm into an industry leader. He turned a “deeply troubled organization” around, along with raising employee morale. Under Williams’s leadership, Aetna swung from a $292 million loss to a $2 billion profit.
In Learning to Lead, Williams tracks his inspiring journey of “overcoming obstacles and conquering barriers.” He grew up on the South Side of Chicago where his dad worked as a bus driver. His first job was washing cars. He became the first person in his family to attend college and, later, received an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
“Ordinary people can achieve great things if they learn how to recognize and understand the barriers that limit them and then start overcoming them, deliberately, creatively, and persistently,” Williams writes.
According to Williams, public-speaking is a skill successful leaders must sharpen if they hope to accomplish what Napoleon said is a leader’s most important role: to “define reality and give hope.”
Williams advises CEOs and aspiring leaders to get feedback on their presentations and communication skills. Practice your presentation in front of trusted team members. Ask them if you’re using language that confuses the audience or if you’re delving into excessive detail, or leaving out information that would help to clarify your ideas.
Williams also believes in ‘saturation messaging.’ According to Williams, “When you have a message that everyone in your organization must understand, try to communicate it through every possible means—and keep repeating the message, even past the point when you are certain that everyone has been exposed to it.”
Trailblazer by Marc Benioff
Long before he made the Forbes billionaires list and even before had his first customer, Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff made purpose an integral ingredient of the Salesforce story. Benioff tells the Salesforce origin story in his book, Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change.
Benioff was determined to build a company that makes a profit and leaves a positive impact. “We decided that no matter how big the company grew, we should always set aside one percent of our equity, product, and employee time for charitable causes,” Benioff writes. The Salesforce 1-1-1 philanthropic program has become a model for thousands of other businesses.
Benioff attributes much of Salesforces’s meteoric market value (from $1 billion to $120 billion since going public in 2004) to his decision to build a company around the values that attracted the best and the brightest employees. Purpose, Benioff says, is “the most powerful engine of growth.”
Leaders are readers. These new books published in 2019 will help you stand out in the workplace.
