Podcast Ep 155 | The 9 books every CEO must read

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. – Harry S. Truman.

As leaders, we are avid learners and readers.  And some of the best insights come from getting different perspectives whether it be from biographies of great leaders from the past or present or research that relates to our industries or completely divergent learning that enhance our perspectives of the world.

Aside from travel, reading is one of the most impactful things we can spend time on to enhance the quality of our thinking and leadership. We all have favourites, but these 9 books are constantly at the top of our lists and the lists of the CEO’s and Executives we work with. In this episode we discuss the 9 books that every CEO (and executive) must read.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE GROWTH WHISPERERS:

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

00:12
Brad Giles
Hi there. Welcome to the Growth Whisperers, where everything that we talk about is building, enduring, great businesses. I’ll be honest, it’s probably targeted at the mid market. That’s how I’m feeling. I didn’t talk to Kev about this, so he’s going to throw some tomatoes at me. Look, we talk about scaling businesses here and the things you got to do, right? And, yeah, we’re pretty passionate about it. My name is Brad Giles, and of course, my co host is Kevin Lawrence g’day. Kevin, how are things for you today in wintery Vancouver?

00:39
Kevin Lawrence
It is, as well as a little rainy Vancouver today, but, yeah, I’m not going to throw any tomatoes. You would call them tomatoes. I would call them tomatoes. It is for the mid market. That’s what we’re focused on, growing mid market companies up to 1000 or two employees. It’s kind of where we focus to yeah, that is our focus. I agree 100%. Yes, we’re aligned.

01:02
Brad Giles
Brad, so you’re doing good. Tell me, what is your phrase of the day there? We’re such a smooth operation here.

01:12
Kevin Lawrence
We’re just clunking along here. Well, my phrase would be I almost started having an Australian accent there, taking tomatoes. I’m always inspired by simplicity and often can be inspired by great chefs. But to take tomatoes, your phrase. A while ago, we took this cooking course with this chef. It was in Vancouver, and amazing cooking course was spectacular. The facility was set up amazing. He just roasted these tomatoes in the oven for, like, half an hour or an hour with a couple of little things sprinkled on them, and they were like to die for. Simple little things executed well on how powerful they are. It’s just the beauty of simple things done well. That’s my how about you? What are you thinking about today? Your phrase?

02:10
Brad Giles
Your well, right now I’m thinking about welcome to cooking tomatoes for mid market company leaders. But my word is pride. Proud. Yeah. Proud is such an interesting word. I’d never really thought about it until about when I thought about it, of course, like everybody. I’d never thought about an impact of a company until maybe, I guess, 1314 years ago, when I was in Boston doing a course with the Entrepreneurs Organization, there was this one guy, Dr. Gerald Bell, and he spoke about pride and why it’s so important in organizations. It’s just one of those moments that stuck with me and that came back today. Pride.

02:55
Kevin Lawrence
So proud about your tomatoes. That’s a great way to weave that together. It is interesting. I had an amazing conversation, actually, with a CEO from your country last week. We were also talking about pride, and I’m just looking up this book, actually, he said it’s a book on humility. We got talking about humility, how important it is. There’s another version of pride, which is also so there’s pride in what you do, which is great. There’s also too much pride in yourself, which is like the opposite of humility. That can be dangerous. I’ve been reading a really interesting book about humility.

03:29
Brad Giles
Based on that conversation, I know we’re going to get on with the episode. This is what I had in both of my books about pride. Employees or people must be proud of their product, they must be proud of their manager, they must be proud of their team, and they must be proud of their company, or they will eventually leave.

03:50
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah. So that is excellent. There’s the part of pride where we get too prideful, which becomes like arrogance or ego getting in the way. That’s a different version of pride than you’re talking about. That can become really dangerous, especially when people are really successful and that stuff starts to creep in.

04:10
Brad Giles
It’s good that we’ve started talking about books, because today is all about books. It’s about the seven books that every CEO must read. Jeez, we’ve been wanting to do this episode for a while. It’s been bouncing around. I got to tell you, there was quite an enduring arm wrestle between the two of us to land on some that we felt, yeah, if you were a new CEO and you had to read a series of books, what would we present you with, ideally, before.

04:41
Kevin Lawrence
You did the job? Interestingly, we had aimed for seven, and we ended up with nine. There might be four other ones at the beginning, and there might be two bonus ones at the end. I’m not sure the intent is seven. Our list actually has nine. I just realized when I looked at it as you were speaking, we’ll call it like Seven Plus. Plus would be an accurate. These are like the most important books that we believe, from what we’ve seen, that are for CEOs to read.

05:12
Brad Giles
Yeah, indeed. We got talking in about our books, right. This episode is not about our books. Don’t press turn off the station yet. But our books. Between us, we’ve seriously worked on and released four books, and they would really be an amazing place to start.

05:37
Kevin Lawrence
First of all, I’ll do yours and you do mine. How about that? Let’s mix it up.

05:45
Brad Giles
What’s important in this episode is that we’re saying this is the book, but this is why. Of course, we’ll put the books in the show notes so you can look on your app. You can see that. Right? So, first of all is scaling up. So, Kevin, you and I both worked on that, but my participation was much smaller than yours. In that book, you went around and interviewed 50 CEOs around the world and helped with all of that. Scaling up is a book by Vern Harnish. And what does scaling up do? It helps you to work on four decisions of people’s strategy, execution, and cash but it’s how to scale your company. It helps you to organize and focus your company around the right things. It’s really like, I guess, a playbook on how to scale. Anything else to add to that’s.

06:40
Kevin Lawrence
Great. That’s more than enough. I’ll cover off Made to Thrive, which was your first book that you did, Brad, and is really about a lot of it. I mean, my takeaway is a lot of it is about the different roles that you have as a leader and what you need to do to be able to thrive in your role. There’s lots more to it than that, but it’s really mastering it’s five different roles. Is that right, Brad?

07:04
Brad Giles
Yeah.

07:06
Kevin Lawrence
Thank God I got that right. Five roles of a leader was really a key piece so that you continue to thrive and do amazing work. Anything you’d add there?

07:14
Brad Giles
Yeah, look, the working title was the Five Roles of a CEO. If Scaling Up tells you what you’ve got to do to your business, then Made to Thrive tells you what your role is.

07:26
Kevin Lawrence
Perfect.

07:27
Brad Giles
And then I guess I’ll move on. If we’re playing tag team, I’ll move on to your oxygen mask first. This book is how to basically survive. So how do you look after yourself? Because not only is it lonely at the top, but also you are incredibly challenged on so many fronts. Many leaders can suffer either mental health issues or physical health issues or just not actually spend their life building something that they really want to do. So, as I best recall and understand, this is about your resilience. If scaling up is about what you need to do to your company, then Made to Thrive is about your role. Your oxygen mask is about looking after yourself.

08:19
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah. Looking after yourself so that you continue to be resilient and grow and don’t get stuck along the way. Awesome. Finally, on Boarded, your most recent book is about when you bring great people into your company. How do you make sure you make them successful and invest the time and energy and clarity of expectations to help them get to the point where they thrive and are successful versus fending for themselves and floundering.

08:47
Brad Giles
Yeah, that’s a good enough summary. That’s fine. Perfect.

08:51
Kevin Lawrence
So those are our four books. We would start with those. We wrote them because we believe they’re important and we are target focus is CEOs and their exec teams. So, Hubble, Brad, I’ll go through the odd number one, you go through the even number ones, and we’re going to go through these and just give a quick list. So let’s get a little drum roll. Outside of our books, number one by the great Jim Collins, and there’s multiple books he’s done, but the number one we have here is good to great. It’s the red book right here behind me. I’m sure it’s right there behind you. It’s in his study of what companies did that transitioned from good to great and compared to others who had the same opportunity and didn’t. What are those main principles? We use them again and again and again. Good to Great, amazing book and study of taking your okay company and making it spectacular and proven principles.

09:50
Kevin Lawrence
That beautiful stuff and it’s probably his most well known book.

09:57
Brad Giles
Look, I guess I find it resonates with people because it’s a 30 year period, it’s highly data driven and it’s irrefutable and it very clearly explains what is great, what makes great in terms of companies.

10:19
Kevin Lawrence
That same identical approach, data driven, et cetera, goes into number two of our top books.

10:29
Brad Giles
That if there was any critic or any issue with Good to Great, it was very large companies. He addresses that in Great by Choice, which is more about the mid market. It’s the same type of approach and understanding what are the disciplines in smaller businesses. I say that up to, I guess, 500 million or whatever the kind of range is. What are the things that work. It’s probably by all accounts a better book, but is probably number two on our list for a reason, because great boy choice has other elements.

11:09
Kevin Lawrence
It is. For when it comes to turbulent times and understanding what to do and how to thrive in those turbulent times, that book is exceptional, basically de, risking risk, in many cases, awesome. The first two by Jim Collins, number three, Brad Smart wrote the original book, although there’s many editions, called Top Grading. His son Jeff wrote a simpler version, more for the mid market called who. It’s basically the guide to a highly disciplined system for predictably hiring the best people and not letting mediocre people infect your organization. Whether it’s around hiring or promoting, it’s a very powerful system and even for both of us. I mean, when I did the interviews for Scaling Up, eight of the CEOs referenced Top Grading as a game changer. Just last week I was down in Chicago and caught up with Christmas, the president of Top Grading. We work with him very closely.

12:09
Kevin Lawrence
He’s a key partner for us because getting those hires wrong is incredibly challenging. So, disciplined approach to consistently getting close to 90% accuracy on your hiring and promotion decisions. Who is a much easier read. Although Chris and Brad Smart have a new book coming out soon that also, I’m hoping will be an easier read because it’s just a little more succinct and top ratings, there’s so much in it.

12:42
Brad Giles
Yeah, I’ve read the new book from Brad Smart and it’s much shorter and much easier to read and more succinct, as you said. So look out for that one. Moving on. How the mighty fall crikey? Jim Collins has cracked three of the top four in our list. No surprises there for regular listeners, I guess, but yeah, how the mighty fall? It introduces or it reinforces the importance of humility. Now, that might be easy to say, but all can fail no matter what. We go back to Jim Con’s definition of a level five leader is a humble leader who wants to build a business that’s bigger than themselves. Now, why does that matter? Because that’s what works. That’s where the great enduring companies come from. The opposite of that. These are the companies that simply don’t succeed and don’t endure. Sure, they may have levels of success, but in terms of ongoing so, yeah, how the mighty fall being number four.

13:45
Kevin Lawrence
The part about it I also love outside of humility is that it shows the eight different behaviors of executive teams that either drive a company up or down. We use this as an assessment on part of our annual Strap meeting, which ties back into last episode about annual strategic planning meetings. That assessment is amazing how the behaviors change and then hurt the company. Okay, number five, the Outsiders, william Thorndyke amazing book about some of the best CEOs and gets to the point that the number one measure of CEO performance is return on invested capital. Right. That is, how much based on the cash they’re given, how much of a return they generate consistently over time. It’s an amazing book, some great stories. Interestingly, based on this measure, most of the top CEOs on their list you have never heard of. Just awesome book. The Outsiders really love it.

14:42
Kevin Lawrence
It really gets you to think about your business differently, especially in a world focused on profitability.

14:48
Brad Giles
Next is better. Simpler strategy by Felix Oberholza. Gee. Yeah. Well, strategy is a hard one because strategy, we’ve got some great in the strategy sphere who’ve got their own thing. How do we get a book on there about strategy that is simple enough that most people can get it? Because many strategy books are written about big companies like the Nestle’s or the Microsoft. So how do we get it? It’s digestible and I guess actionable at this kind of level. This book enables us to look at how to improve our strategy through two levers are customers willing to pay more and our suppliers or employees willing to work for less. By having those guardrails, it helps us to view the strategy through a different lens.

15:48
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, one of the executive leaders that we work with met the professor at one of the programs. I think it was Harvard or nCiD, and they shared it with me. I was like, wow, they said it’s the best they’d ever read. I didn’t believe it when I read it. I was like, wow, it was awesome. Okay, number seven. Shockingly, it’s also got a seven in the title. The seven hidden reasons employees leave Branham. This is a book that we found more than a decade ago. Basically, managers will tell you that people leave for money, and it’s not the truth about 90% of the time, and through exit interviews, they have found that really, people don’t leave for money. They leave for these other seven reasons. If you understand them and manage them, you can keep your A players engaged and they won’t have to leave and tell you that the excuse that they left for money.

16:37
Brad Giles
That’s important as a CEO, because you might think, yeah, that’s a good job. I’ll get the HR people to read that. That’s important because that reinforces the importance of culture and all of the other things and to understand that there is a component I go back to the made to thrive. There is a component of the leader’s job, which is about culture exactly.

16:59
Kevin Lawrence
Making sure that the managers are doing a good job and managers aren’t making excuses when they screw up and lose good people. Yeah, I love that book because, again, data takes all the noise out of the system, and we validated it, my gosh, hundreds of times, and our experience backs up. We have almost never lost a key leader for money. I don’t think I know of one yet. It’s been those other seven reasons the money was on the table, but that’s not really the reason those other things weren’t in place. Okay.

17:31
Brad Giles
Number eight turn the Ship Around, by David Marquee. I remember seeing when that book came out, I remember seeing him. He was an admiral in the US. Navy who’s given the worst performing submarine in the fleet, and he turned it around to be the best. But this is not about submarines. If you don’t know or understand or care for the military or the navy, there’s no problem at all, because primarily this is about how to transfer ownership from a leader to another person and responsibility with two employees so that they come to you with recommendations and they take accountability and ownership over what they do always. It unlocks a new level, I guess, in your organization.

18:22
Kevin Lawrence
It’s basically teaching for my takeaway, and a lot of people use this after reading the book, as we’re seeing them, is training people to come and say, I intend to people coming to you with solutions and plans, and you either say, great, proceed, or, hey, have you thought about this? Or have you considered it’s just a great way that you and your team can both learn to operate at a higher level. Okay. Number nine, last but not least necessary endings, henry Dr. Henry Cloud. We’re always obsessed with doing new things and starting new things and initiatives and programs, but this is basically talking about how important it is to end things. It was really impactful when I read I need to read it a few years ago. I need to go back and read it again, but how important it is to stop things, end things, end relationships in business and life and things like that, and freeing up resources for things that matter more.

19:15
Kevin Lawrence
It’s a real deep walk down that road, and it was well done. Really powerful book because it gets to one of the hardest part of all of our jobs. Ending things, killing things. Killing or sorry, I don’t like the word killing, but ending things, stopping things.

19:29
Brad Giles
Yeah, let’s not use that word. Yeah, it’s counter. That’s the thing. We look at all of the jobs, what could be attributed to or that could be attributed to a leader, and we can sometimes think it’s the same. The same. This is completely from a different perspective, that there are necessarily endings. We need to think, how are we going to stop this? So, moving that’s nine. They’re the top nine. Through our arm wrestle, which is the preparation for this episode, we came up with two other ones to consider, and we’ll do them really quick.

20:11
Kevin Lawrence
Because we’re getting tight on time. Yeah.

20:13
Brad Giles
My bonus is a book called Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Halliday. See, we think that success lies in the outside world, but we can’t achieve success because we sabotage ourselves all the time and we don’t even know it. Remember there was the angel and the Devil and the cartoons? Well, the devil is your ego and it’s always there sabotaging everything that you want. I encourage leaders to read this and it always gives them a different frame of mind. What’s your bonus, Kev?

20:42
Kevin Lawrence
Actually, Brad, I remember when I learned about that book, I was with you in Australia having a conversation with you and some of your CEOs, and one of the guys there in a room mentioned it. I remember hearing about that book. Mine is a classic from 1937, a book by Napoleon Hill called Think and Grow Rich. It’s one of the early success classics. Many of the modern day books have pieces or essence of the DNA of that book in it. Napoleon Hill went and studied the most successful American industrialists and what made them successful. It’s like Jim Collins, in a way. It’s a study of what made them successful, which you can look at and look for ways to replicate it. Amazing book. I think I’ve read it six ish times. I am ready to go back and read it again. Anyways, that’s it. So upfront summarize our books, Brad’s.

21:30
Kevin Lawrence
Made to thrive and onboarded Mine, your oxygen mask first, and the one that I was a key driver behind. No One Name is not on the COVID but scaling up, starting with those, because those are what we think are important. That’s why we wrote them. And then the list. Good. To great by choice. Top grading. How the mighty fall outsiders better. Simpler strategy. Seven hidden reasons. Employees leave Turnership around and necessary endings. That would be the core nine. The bonuses ego is the enemy was Brad’s and thinking Grow rich was mine. Hopefully those are some new ones in there that you can read and will provide you some powerful insights.

22:07
Brad Giles
Yeah must read. We didn’t write that lightly. If you had the opportunity or if you haven’t read them, this is where we encourage you to head. Hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. My name is Brad Giles and you can find me@evolutionpartners.com.au where I produce a weekly newsletter you potentially could find interesting in some way, as does Kevin. He produces a newsletter each week with thoughts and ideas about building great companies. You can find Kev at lawrenceandco.com and you can find us on YouTube. Of course, we always see a great spike when people rate the show, so we would love it if you could do us the smallest favor and rate the show on your listening vehicle of choice. Hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. Talking about the nine books that every CEO must read. Look forward to chatting to you again next week.