8 Inspirational Books You Should Read this Summer
We have had some incredibly fascinating guests on our Disrupt Your Career podcast in the last few months. Now you have had a chance to listen to their conversations with us, it might be time to dig in deeper and read their books too. Any or all of these will give you additional perspective on how to progress and thrive in your career. Happy holiday reading, wherever you may be headed!
Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders
By Amanda Goodall
A leading business expert shows why expertise really matters, and how leaders who deeply understand the nuts and bolts of their industry and organization –from businesses, to hospitals, to universities, to sports— make all the difference for its success and the happiness of people who work there.
Amanda Goodall has spent a decade researching what makes organizations tick, everywhere from the business world to hospitals and healthcare systems, football and basketball teams, and Formula 1 organizations. By debunking the cult of managerialism (the notion that smart people can run anything and the emphasis on leadership personality), Goodall reshapes our understanding of bosses and the traits necessary for organizational success. She identifies the key characteristics of expert leaders and provides a real and grossly underappreciated model for career success.
Credible demonstrates categorically that expertise matters more than ever and that we need our leaders to be experts with a deep, understanding of their organizations from many years spent learning the business and working their way up the ladder. The people who work for them are happier because they feel better understood and the organizations they lead are more successful.
Listen to Amanda’s Disrupt Your Career Podcast →
Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High-Growth Organizations
By Dr. T. Brad Harris and Andrew C. Bartlow
Managing a high-growth organization requires both strategy and adaptability. Unfortunately, start-up founders and executives seeking to scale up to the next level find all too frequently that growth turns into chaos. Rather than laying the groundwork for the future, organizations get stuck by covering up complex problems with unsustainable band-aids and duct-tape fixes, implementing anecdote-based solutions from the latest tech-industry unicorns or leadership books, and relying on too much on-the-fly learning from inexperienced managers.
This book is the definitive guide for leaders of high-growth organizations seeking to understand and execute the people-management principles that are essential to continued success. Combining a wealth of practical experience, well-grounded academic research, and easy-to-apply frameworks, Andrew Bartlow and T. Brad Harris offer a practical toolkit that founders, functional leaders, and managers of people can use to rethink their practices to meet their organizations’ needs. They help readers identify the core people-management programs and practices that are best for an organization at its current stage and size while also supporting a foundation for continued development and the capacity to adapt to inevitable surprises. Practical, actionable, and supplemented with numerous diagnostic tools and illustrative examples, Scaling for Success is a must-have playbook for organizational leaders pursuing smart and sustainable growth.
Listen to Andrew’s Disrupt Your Career Podcast →
I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique
By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic tackles one of the biggest questions facing our species: Will we use artificial intelligence to improve the way we work and live, or will we allow it to alienate us?
In I, Human, Tomas takes readers on an enthralling and eye-opening journey across the AI landscape. Though AI has the potential to change our lives for the better, he argues, AI is also worsening our bad tendencies, making us more distracted, selfish, biased, narcissistic, entitled, predictable, and impatient. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Filled with fascinating insights about human behavior and our complicated relationship with technology, I, Human will help us stand out and thrive when many of our decisions are being made for us. To do so, we’ll need to double down on our curiosity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence while relying on the lost virtues of empathy, humility, and self-control.
Listen to Tomas’ Disrupt Your Career Podcast →
Use Your Difference to Make a Difference: How to Connect and Communicate in a Cross-Cultural World
By Tayo Rockson
Recent years have seen dramatic changes to several institutions worldwide. Our increasingly interconnected, digitized, and globalized world presents immense opportunities and unique challenges. Modern businesses and schools interact with individuals and organizations from a diverse range of cultural and national backgrounds―increasing the likelihood for miscommunication, errors in strategy, and unintended consequences in the process. This has also spilled into our daily lives and the way we consume information today. Understanding how to navigate these and other pitfalls requires adaptability, nuanced cross-cultural communication, and effective conflict resolution. Use Your Difference to Make a Difference provides readers with a skills-based, actionable plan that transforms differences into agents of inclusiveness, connection, and mutual understanding.
This innovative and timely guide illustrates how to leverage differences to move beyond unconscious biases, manage a culturally-diverse workplace, create an environment for more tolerant schooling environments, more trusted media, communicate across borders, find and retain diverse talent, and bridge the gap between working locally and expanding globally. Expert guidance on a comprehensive range of topics―teamwork, leadership styles, information sharing, delegation, supervision, giving and receiving feedback, coaching and motivation, recruiting, managing suppliers and customers, and more―helps you manage the essential aspects of international relationships and cultural awareness.
Use Your Difference to Make a Difference is a must-have resource for any educator, parent, leader, manager, or team member of an organization that interacts with co-workers and customers from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Listen to Tayo’s Disrupt Your Career Podcast →
Show the Value of What You Do: Measuring and Achieving Success in Any Endeavor
By Patricia and Jack J. Phillips
In an era of evidence-based inquiry, people need to be able to demonstrate the value of their projects credibly. But how do you do that when there isn’t an obvious measure connected to the project, like increased sales?
In their book Patti and Jack Phillips, the cofounders of ROI Institute, show how you can adopt the same methodology used by more than 6,000 organizations in seventy countries to evaluate large institutional initiatives. By following their six-step process, you can build a case for any project, process, or intervention, even so-called soft programs. For example, the first case study in the book involves successfully demonstrating the effectiveness of chaplaincy in an intensive care unit.
The authors explain how to link your project to a meaningful business outcome, make sure your project will actually influence that outcome, identify metrics that will show if you’re making progress, collect and analyze data, and use the results to build support.
This book includes extensive examples from a wide range of organizations: businesses, nonprofits, schools, law enforcement, and more. It provides diagnostic tools and supportive practices and even offers advice on how to find a positive interpretation for results that don’t conform to your anticipated outcome.
Listen to Patti and Jack’s Disrupt Your Career Podcast →
Crunch Time – How Married Couples Confront Unemployment
By Aliya Hamid Rao
In Crunch Time, Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work―that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women―loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make men’s unemployment an urgent problem, while women’s unemployment―cocooned within a narrative of staying at home―is almost a non-issue.
Crunch Time reveals the minutiae of how gendered norms and behaviors are actively maintained by spouses at a time when they could be dismantled, and how gender is central to the ways couples react to and make sense of unemployment.me.
Listen to Aliya’s Disrupt Your Career Podcast (coming in August 2023) →
MBA Insider: How to Make the Most of Your MBA Experience
By Al Dea
Packed with invaluable knowledge from start to finish, Al Dea peels back the curtain and draws on his very own MBA experience and learnings from his blog, MBASchooled, as well as hundreds of informative interviews with both current MBA students and Alum.
Written to help prospective students easily navigate the MBA experience and maximize their investment in their education, MBA Insider provides the kind of expert guidance, best practices, and real-world examples that every MBA student wished they knew from the very beginning.
MBA Insider offers a detailed guide to prospective and current MBA students, to help understand what business school is actually like, the key aspects and elements of MBA programs, and guidance on how to get the most value out of your MBA education in order to achieve the specific career growth that you desire.
Listen to Al’s Disrupt Your Career Podcast →
The Self-Employed Life: Business and Personal Development Strategies That Create Sustainable Success
By Jeffrey Shaw
To be self-employed means more than employing oneself. It’s putting your entire self into your business with a willingness to grow personally and to take action towards building the successful life of your dreams.
Small business consultant, photographer and host of The Self-Employed Life podcast Jeffrey Shaw believes we must develop ourselves personally first in order to increase our capacity for the success in business we want. Then all our hard work pays off!
What self-employed business owners need is both business strategies and personal development to reach and maintain that success. In The Self-Employed Life, Shaw offers a three-part ecosystem for success:
– Personal development: Remove limited thinking and establish forward-thinking mindsets
– Business strategies: marketing, business model, systems and other key tools for growing your business
– Daily habits: Efficient and effective habits to even out the ups and downs of being self-employed
This holistic approach will equip you over the long haul, beyond the mechanics of setting up and running a business.
Listen to Jeffrey’s Disrupt Your Career Podcast →
What about you? What have you been reading that has captured your imagination in this sort of area? Do let us know some of your favorites, and please, make suggestions of podcast guests you would like to see us inviting next. https://disrupt-your-career.com/contact/
Sign up
Sign up to receive regular insightful news and advice on managing your career and receive a free gift. Inspiration delivered straight to your Inbox!