A reading list for apex executives

Our book, The Open Executive, is specifically for the apex executives: the people at the top of the hierarchal pyramid. Here is the reading list from that book, plus others we recommend.

The Amazon links here are paid links, you support us when you use them, so thank-you.

On leadership, in no particular order:

Leading Together, Brent Lowe, Susan Basterfield, Travis Marsh . . Amazon Covers very similar ground to The Open Executive. A good book. (Except it still talks about assigning people to roles, instead of allowing shared fluid work based on skills – what we call Teal ShuHaRi)
The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst. Leading with meritocracy. (A narrower definition of “open” than we are using here). . . Amazon
The Leader’s Dilemma, Hope, Bunce, and Roosli. An excellent introduction to better ways of leading.. . Amazon
Turn the Ship Around, L. David Marquet. Invitational management and distributed decision making. In a submarine. .. . Amazon
Be REMARKABLE, Karen Ferris. Exactly the same messages as our book, only written by our friend Karen, who beat us to it. A great second opinion. . . . Amazon
The New Economics, W. Edwards Deming. To show these ideas are not new (the book is from 1993, and is the culmination of Deming’s career). ... Amazon.
Maverick, Ricardo Semler, the founder of Semco, a model of worker autonomy. . . Amazon
Higher Ground, Alison Taylor. An insightful new work on corporate ethics. . . Amazon
Directing the Agile Organisation, Evan Leybourn. For board directors. . . . Amazon

For your own personal development, it is hard to recommend books because the journey is so…well… personal. We suggest

The Authentic Shift, Carl Lindeborg. A new book, almost perfectly aligned with what we say in our book. . . . Amazon
Emotional Agility, Dr Susan David. Worked for me.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey. A classic.
The Earned Life, Marshall Goldsmith. Buddhist ideas of accepting impermanence and avoiding endless happiness deferral.

More generally, we like these introductory books to Open ways of managing and working. Pick one or two of these:

Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan. Our recommended starter book.
A Radical Enterprise, Matt Parker. Or maybe this is our recommended starter book.
Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux. The seminal work that kicked a lot of “open” thinking off. Don’t miss the Foreword by Ken Wilber.
Corporate Rebels, Pim de Moree and Joost Minnaar. An introduction framed around their many case studies of WDGLL.
Management 3.0, Jurgen Appelo. A colourful overview of these better ways of managing.
Open Management , Rob England and Dr Cherry Vu

Then read some of these:

Strategic Doing, Ed Morrison. Solid practical methods. Our top pick for the book you read after an introductory one.
Humanocracy, Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini. Bureaucracy kills organisations. Humanocracy frees them.
How Organizations Should Work, Dean Meyer. For the academic thinker.
Team of Teams, Stanley McChrystal. Distributed decision making to try to defeat the Taliban.
Sooner Safer Happier, Jonathan Smart. A comprehensive overview of open management and work.
The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni. It still retains some 20th Century thinking, but it has some great insights that we use in the book.
The agile Manager (small a), Rob England and Dr Cherry Vu

If you want to learn more about complexity:

How Complex Systems Fail, Dr Richard Cook. A brief paper available as downloadable PDF – google it.
The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge. This book is supposed to be about the culture of learning, but it is actually a masterclass in complex systems thinking, highly recommended.
Beyond Command and Control, John Seddon. Read at least the first half.
Cynefin, Dave Snowden. A collection of essays for the serious reader.
S&T Happens, Rob England and Dr Cherry Vu.

Out there even further, looking at leaders’ role in a better society, consider:

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, Rebecca Henderson. A reformation of capitalism’s practices, toward a sustainable and inclusive model.
Citizens, Jon Alexander. Move from seeing ourselves as passive consumers to active citizens, taking shared responsibility for the challenges we face and transforming society through collective agency. . Amazon

To learn more about AI in business, we recommend the Business Agility Institute’s authoritative research paper From Constraints to Capabilities: AI as a Force Multiplier.

We know that’s a ridiculous number of books. We left as many out. This is a well-covered field now.

And if you want to understand why you should use small successful consulting companies like Teal Unicorn instead of the “Big C” management consulting corporations, read