Leadership

Follett was a contemporary of Taylor and argued against almost everything he stood for. Where Taylor saw management as control through measurement, Follett saw it as coordination through relationship — power with, not po…

Theory X assumes people dislike work and must be coerced; Theory Y assumes people are intrinsically motivated and capable of self-direction. McGregor's point was not that Y is correct and X is wrong, but that every manag…

Bush's memoir of directing the US wartime science effort — the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the coordination of the Manhattan Project, and the institutional design that made American science dominant fo…

Kotter's short HBR piece making a clean distinction between management (coping with complexity: planning, organising, controlling) and leadership (coping with change: setting direction, aligning people, motivating). The…

Goleman's HBR article on the six leadership styles — coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, coaching — and the argument that effective leaders switch between them based on the situation. The piece…

Van Vugt and colleagues apply evolutionary psychology to leadership — the argument that the cognitive architecture humans use to lead and follow each other was shaped by small-group hunter-gatherer life, and most contemp…

Owen and Davidson's article proposes hubris syndrome as an acquired personality disorder — specific patterns of behaviour that emerge in people who have held substantial power for substantial time, with a consistent set…

Marquet took command of a nuclear submarine with the lowest performance ratings in the US Navy and turned it into one of the highest, largely by inverting the relationship between command and initiative — moving from "I…

Alznauer's book applies evolutionary biology to contemporary leadership practice — drawing on anthropology, primatology and evolutionary psychology to argue that effective leadership aligns with rather than fights agains…

Fontaine's monograph, published through the US Army's professional military education system, argues that empathy is a core competence for leadership in the complex operational environments modern armies face — not a sof…

Phil Jackson won eleven NBA championships as a coach — six with the Bulls, five with the Lakers — and the book is his account of how to lead teams of extreme talent and extreme ego. Jackson's method blended triangle-offe…

Horowitz wrote the book for CEOs going through the specific kinds of pain that are not covered in business school — firing executives, laying off staff, competing while nearly insolvent, managing your own psychology unde…

Catmull's account of running Pixar and later Disney Animation — thirty years of specific organisational practices designed to make creative work survive the forces that usually destroy it. The book is more honest than mo…

McChrystal commanded US special operations in Iraq and the book is his account of discovering that his enemy — decentralised, networked, fast — was organised for the problem his traditional hierarchy was not. The solutio…

The standard book for the individual contributor-to-manager transition in technology companies, structured as a progression from mentoring an intern through managing a team, managing managers, and eventually running an e…

Sinek's practical companion to Start With Why — a workbook for individuals and teams to articulate their own purpose. The book is formulaic, which is either its strength or its weakness depending on who you ask. For prod…

The operational handbook for scaling startups from product-market fit through rapid growth to IPO, based on Gil's experience as a founder and operator at Google and Twitter and on extensive interviews with people like Ma…

Cagan's SVPG essay on what it takes to establish a real product culture — not the performative version, the version that actually makes a product organisation produce better products. The piece is more direct than most o…

Horowitz's second book is about culture — but told through unusual case studies: Toussaint Louverture's slave revolution in Haiti, the samurai bushido code, Shaka Senghor's prison gang, and Genghis Khan's meritocratic ar…

Larson codifies the engineering management knowledge that was previously tribal — how to size teams, how to run migrations without halting feature work, how to handle organizational debt, how to design career ladders tha…

Cagan's sequel to Inspired — where Inspired describes what strong product teams do, Empowered describes what product leadership does to produce them. The book is organised around coaching, recruiting, product vision, and…

Hastings and Meyer jointly reconstruct the Netflix operating system — not as a set of policies but as a set of dependencies: talent density enables candor, candor enables the removal of controls, and the removal of contr…

Ken Norton spent a decade running product at Google Ventures and writes one of the more humane newsletters in the product management space. This piece is about empathy as a working practice — not a posture but a set of s…

A book about what senior individual contributors actually do in large organisations — the work that creates value when you no longer write most of the code yourself. Reilly, a principal engineer at Squarespace, describes…

Claire Hughes Johnson served as COO of Stripe during the period when it grew from a few hundred to thousands of employees, and this book is the operational manual she wrote from that experience. It is not theory — it con…

This Harvard Business School case study examines one of the most successful yet obscure software companies of the past three decades, offering a rare window into how vertical market software businesses scale through acqu…