Here is a complete list of all the books I’ve reviewed to date. Every book I review can be purchased right now from Barnes and Noble or from an awesome independent book seller The Tattered Cover Bookstore. Purchasing books through these partners helps me keep this website going.
Thank you and Happy Reading!
David M. Dye
12 Most Consequential Books for New Leaders
I originally published this list at 12Most and it has since been republished, viewed, and shared by thousands of people. I hope you find it helpful. Remember, when you purchase these books through the provided links, you help keep this website going! With thousands of leadership and management books to choose from, where do you [...]
Book Review: Crucial Conversations
Today’s book review does not feature leadership or management in the title or table of contents. Even so, I personally consider the contents of this book to be among the most critically important skills any leader or manager can learn. The book is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Patterson, Grenny, [...]
Book Review: Death by Meeting
Meetings are maligned almost as frequently as doctors and lawyers. Just about all of us, whether volunteer or employee, have suffered through horrible meetings that can range from a pure waste of time all the way to destructive and relationship-ending. And yet, we are social beings. We need to exchange information, problem solve, and build [...]
Book Review: Encouraging the Heart
Do you want to build a team with ownership, hope, results, and pride? If so, the subject of today’s book review will help! Encouraging the Heart: a Leader’s Guide to Rewarding and Recognizing Others by James Kouzes and Barry Posner is a follow up resource to The Leadership Challenge. For those familiar with Leadership Challenge, [...]
Book Review: Everyone a Leader
Waiting for Help? If we wait on our identified positional leaders (CEOs, Presidents, etc) to do what needs to be done, we will be waiting a very long time. For decades now, people have been suggesting that we need leaders at every level of every organization – whether its a company or our country, positional [...]
Book Review: First, Break All the Rules
Today’s book review features a title specifically targeted at managers: First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. One distinguishing feature of this book is that it’s based on a huge sample of interviews conducted with managers – over 80,000 of them, as it says [...]
Book Review: Getting Things Done
Leadership? Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen is not a book about leadership or management…at least not exactly. Even so, it is a very helpful resource for anyone trying to make a difference. As I mentioned in Simply Your Leadership, you have a finite amount of time and a potentially [...]
Book Review: Getting to Yes
Recently, I observed two business professionals get locked into a heated exchange that went something like this: A: “I want you to give me cookies.” B: “We don’t give out cookies.” A: “If you don’t give me cookies, I won’t work with you.” B: “We don’t give out cookies. I have repeatedly found it is [...]
Book Review: Good to Great
This week’s book review is really a two-for-one. Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t was a follow-up to an earlier work called Built to Last. In part, Good to Great is the focus of this review, but really, of all the books in this series, the most [...]
Book Review: How to Choose the Right Person for the Right Job Every Time
The bottom line isn’t the bottom line: people are the bottom line. Whether you are a manager hiring a team-member or a volunteer leader assembling a team, people are your most important asset. Having the right people doing the right things is vital to any team’s effectiveness. The subject of today’s book review addresses the [...]
Book Review: How to Win Friends and Influence People
There are few books in the self-help genre as widely known as the subject of today’s book review: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. While it is a classic, I have to admit that I steered clear of it and did not read this one for many years. I found the title [...]
Book Review: Influencer
“But I told them!” Many of my coaching conversations with leaders and managers eventually give rise to those words. The frustrated leader is confused as to why the team is acting as they always have despite a conversation or two about doing things differently. Just about all of us have been a part of a [...]
Book Review: Leadership and the One Minute Manager
Last week’s book review included the concept that effective managers treat different people differently. This week, we look at a resource that suggests effective leaders and managers also treat the same person differently. The book is Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness through Situational Leadership by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi. [...]
Book Review: Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em
In sales, there is a saying that keeping an existing customer is worth far more than attracting a new customer. It is often the same with personnel. Every team, every organization relies on skilled and motivated people. The first key to assembling a great team is to keep the great performers you already have. Beverly [...]
Book Review: Management
The Book A book with a one-word title like Management had better be the end all authority on the subject. The subject of today’s book review, Management by Peter Drucker, is exactly that. It has been hailed by many as the management bible. When he taught his university executive management courses, Drucker used this book exclusively [...]
Book Review: Management Mess-Ups
What Not to Do Sometimes it’s fun to define things by their negative…if you’re not quite sure what you DO want, at least you can start with what you DON’T want. I have taken this approach myself with a high-level look at management practices. The subject of today’s book review is the crown jewel of [...]
Book Review: Mandela’s Way
Today’s book review is Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage written by Time Magazine’s Richard Stengel. In his introductory remarks, Stengel refers to Nelson Mandela as possibly the “last pure hero on the planet”. Despite the laudatory remarks, one of the best things about this book is the it takes a realistic [...]
Book Review: One Piece of Paper
Reminder: I’m collecting your questions to answer during a series in February. I’ve received some great ones so far – keep them coming! What Should I Do? In your leadership journey you’ll often find yourself looking in the mirror and asking what you should do. This is a difficult question to answer if you have [...]
Book Review: Principle-Centered Leadership
Stephen Covey is best known for the immensely popular 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Less well-known, however, but every bit as helpful for emerging leaders is the subject of this week’s book review: Principle Centered Leadership: Strategies for Personal and Professional Effectiveness In Principle-Centered Leadership, Covey makes the case that effective leadership is built [...]
Book Review: QBQ
For emerging leaders, the idea of personal accountability can be uncomfortable – particularly if you come from a background where “being accountable” meant being in trouble. Real accountability, however, is an empowering experience. It’s about realizing and owning your own responsibility and ability in the world – the exact opposite of the blame game that [...]
Book Review: Salsa, Soul, and Spirit
I hope that each of us eventually comes to that dawning moment where we realize that the world is a much bigger place than we ever realized. When it comes, it can be very humbling as we come to understand that our way of doing and thinking isn’t everyone else’s way, that our own personal [...]
Book Review: Strengths-Based Leadership
Only strengths are useful for building – nothing is built on weakness. This is another of Peter Drucker’s succinct messages to managers. Quit fooling around trying to eliminate people’s weaknesses and begin building on their strengths. It is a vitally important message made all the more so because emerging leaders and managers often do not [...]
Book Review: The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader
If you pay a visit to your local book store, John Maxwell has nearly an entire shelf of books devoted to various aspects of leadership. The foundation of these many volumes is the subject of today’s book review: The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader: Becoming the Person Others Will Want to Follow. This [...]
Book Review: The Effective Executive
This week’s book review is a classic: management guru Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. Don’t be put off by the title – as Drucker makes very clear early in the work, his definition of “executive” includes almost anyone with management responsibilities in a knowledge work environment. This work is a distillation of some of the [...]
Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
There are a number of different team-work formulas that have circulated over the years. Some of them rhyme, some require sophisticated knowledge of varied personality profiles, and some rely on boundary-pushing activities to bring members together. Most of these frameworks have an element or two that are worthwhile, but none of them have the simple [...]
Book Review: The Fred Factor
Pick a Corner There’s a quote I heard as a child – I believe it was attributed to Norman Rockwell, but even if in our web-ified age I have been unable to find a source for it. It went something like this: “If everyone picked just one corner of the world and took responsibility for [...]
Book Review: The Go Giver
The subject of today’s book review, The Go Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea, written by Bob Burg and John David Mann repackages some enduring human relationship truths in a business setting. In the popular style of the instructional fable, The Go Giver tells the story of a frustrated salesman who feels [...]
Book Review: The Leadership Challenge
Today’s book review is The Leadership Challenge written by James Kousez and Barry Posner. I have owned several copies of this book and continually lend it out. Sometimes those loaners are returned, though often they are not – and I can’t blame the person for hanging on to it. The Leadership Challenge is a standard [...]
Book Review: The Oz Principle
Today’s book review is The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability by Hickman, Smith, and Collins. The Oz Principle is an entire book thoroughly exploring one concept: responsibility. I appreciate this book for its laser-sharp focus on helping individuals and organizations recognize that they are responsible for their own reactions, decisions, behaviors, [...]
Book Review: The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle
There are two books I recommend for leaders who are starting their journey and want to get moving in the right direction. The first is The Leadership Challenge for its down-to-earth and accessible practices which help develop influence and credibility. The second book is the topic of today’s book review: The World’s Most Powerful Leadership [...]
Book Review: Tribal Leadership
Insight Every once in a while you encounter an idea that acts like a new pair of glasses – suddenly you can see the world with clarity you didn’t have a moment before. The subject of today’s book review holds that kind of concept. It is a refreshing and graceful addition to and departure from [...]
Book Review: Wooden
Madness For American college basketball fans, March is the holy month when the season culminates in three frenetic weeks of tournaments popularly known as March Madness. The author of the book I’m reviewing today was no stranger to this tournament. In fact, as a basketball coach he and his teams set records no one has [...]
This List Needs You!
Where Am I? I am guest posting today at 12-Most, a community focused on “Savy smartitude for busy professionals in easy-to-digest list posts that mean business.” You’ll find today’s post, 12 Most Consequential Books for New Leaders there. Please head on over and take a look at the list. You Can Help! Then I’d like [...]
