Recommended Reading
20 hand-picked books for leaders, communicators, and entrepreneurs.
Abundance
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that the United States has developed a governing style that blocks the building of homes, infrastructure, clean energy, and public goods, even where the political will exists. They propose an 'abundance agenda' focused on removing procedural and regulatory bottlenecks so that liberal and progressive goals can actually be delivered at scale.
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Antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces 'antifragile' as a category beyond robust or resilient: systems that gain from shocks, volatility, and stress. Drawing on probability, biology, medicine, and finance, he argues for building institutions, portfolios, and personal habits that benefit from disorder rather than merely surviving it.
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Bullies to Buddies
School psychologist Izzy Kalman presents a self-directed approach to handling bullying that treats teasing, insults, and exclusion as social dynamics children can learn to defuse. The book teaches simple principles drawn from the Golden Rule and cognitive-behavioral techniques, with dialogue examples aimed at helping children respond without escalation.
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Dopamine Kids
NPR science correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff draws on recent research suggesting dopamine drives motivation rather than pleasure, and applies that lens to children's use of screens and ultraprocessed foods. The book lays out a five-step, four-week plan for parents to reset household norms, replace screen time with equally engaging activities, and remove environmental triggers that pull kids toward compulsive use.
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Free-Range Kids
Journalist Lenore Skenazy makes the case that everyday parenting has become distorted by exaggerated perceptions of risk, and that children lose important developmental experiences when they are constantly supervised. The book combines crime and safety statistics with reader letters and practical routines meant to help parents give kids more independence.
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Generations
Psychologist Jean Twenge analyzes survey data covering roughly 39 million Americans to compare six generational cohorts across attitudes, behaviors, and life outcomes. She argues that technology, more than events or economics, is the underlying driver of generational change, and traces implications for work, family, politics, and mental health.
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How the Mighty Fall
Ryan cites this book on the Shift Happens Podcast as the warning label for leaders reshaping their whole company around AI. His example is Collins' Rubbermaid case: a company that averaged a new product every single day for 365 days in 1992, mistook motion for strategy, and slid from the end of Stage 2 to Stage 5 in about five years. The point Ryan draws from it is that undisciplined pursuit of more looks exactly like innovation from the inside, which is why the shiny new thing is so hard to resist and so expensive to chase.
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Hunt, Gather, Parent
NPR science correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff travels with her toddler daughter to live with Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe families and observes how those cultures raise cooperative, self-directed children. She contrasts those practices with mainstream Western parenting and distills a set of methods (organized around the acronym TEAM: Togetherness, Encouragement, Autonomy, Minimal Interference) for readers to try at home.
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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
One of my favorite marketing books of all time. A communicator's guide to creating ideas that are worth sharing and easy to pass on.
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Predictably Irrational
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presents experiments demonstrating that human decision-making departs from rational-choice models in systematic, repeatable ways. Topics include the anchoring effect, the pull of 'free,' the pricing power of expectations, and how social versus market norms shape behavior in everyday choices.
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Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
An inspiring look at the true hardships and grit an entrepreneur must face to succeed. Phil Knight's honest account of building Nike is required reading for anyone starting something from nothing.
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Team of Rivals
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin traces Abraham Lincoln's 1860 nomination and presidency by weaving together the lives of the men he defeated for the Republican nomination and then appointed to his cabinet, including William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates. The book examines how Lincoln managed rivals, ambition, and dissent while leading the country through the Civil War.
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The Anxious Generation
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that adolescent mental health began to deteriorate sharply around 2012, driven by the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one alongside overprotective real-world parenting. He compiles international data and proposes four norms, including no smartphones before high school and no social media before age sixteen, addressed to families, schools, tech companies, and governments.
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The Digital Delusion
Ryan cited this book on Cowboy State Daily to make the case that cognitive erosion is real and measurable. Horvath's argument, that classroom technology has coincided with a genuine decline in kids' cognitive ability, is one of the sharpest data-backed challenges to the idea that more screens automatically means more learning.
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The Epic of America
Historian James Truslow Adams surveys American history from colonial settlement through the early twentieth century, tracing how national character, institutions, and popular attitudes took shape. The book is the source of the phrase 'the American Dream,' which Adams defines as a social order in which each person can attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.
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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Consultant Patrick Lencioni presents a business fable about a fictional Silicon Valley executive brought in to fix a dysfunctional leadership team, followed by a short model section. He identifies five stacked dysfunctions (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results) and offers exercises for addressing each.
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The Identity Trap
Political scientist Yascha Mounk traces the intellectual history of what he calls the 'identity synthesis,' following ideas from postmodernism, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory as they moved from the academy into mainstream institutions. He argues for a return to liberal universalism as a more effective basis for pluralistic democracies.
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The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Among my favorites. Duhigg unpacks the little things we do every day — often without knowing why — and gives leaders and marketers the framework to design better habit loops, both for themselves and their teams.
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The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Communications coach Carmine Gallo breaks down the keynote presentations Steve Jobs gave at Apple and reverse-engineers a repeatable method for building and delivering high-stakes talks. The book is structured in three acts covering how to plan a story, deliver an experience, and refine and rehearse, with practical exercises for each element.
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Winning from Within
Harvard negotiation lecturer Erica Ariel Fox introduces a model of the 'performance gap' between what leaders know they should do and what they actually do under pressure. She maps the mind as an internal 'executive team' of four archetypes (Dreamer, Thinker, Lover, Warrior) and offers practices for aligning them so that outward behavior matches inward intent.
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