Next term, I’ll be teaching a module on leadership at Cass Business School – here are my top ten books on the reading list.
The course has been great fun to put together. The sessions are designed to be highly interactive – linking theory with practice, incorporating application and consideration of current business strategy techniques, leadership theory and organisational behaviour and change theory.
The theme of the course will be survival through innovation – how the best leaders are managing change and adapting to shifting circumstances. The circumstances I’ll focus on will be the disruptive (and exciting) impact of digital and social technologies.
My leadership reading list includes:
- Senge, Peter, “The Fifth Discipline” (Currency, 2006, second edition)
- Goleman, Daniel, “Emotional Intelligence” (Bloomsbury, 1996)
- Bernoff, Josh and Li, Charlene, “Groundswell” (Harvard Business Press 2008)
- Scoble, Rob and Israel, Shel, “Naked Conversations” (Wiley, 2006)
- Shirky, Clay, “Here Comes Everybody” (Allen Lane, 2008)
- De Geus, Arie, “The Living Company” (Nicholas Brealey, 1997)
- Levine, Rick, Locke, Christopher, Searls, Doc and Weinberger, David, “The Cluetrain Manifesto” (Basic, 2001)
- Fried, Jason and Hansson, David, “Rework” (Ebury, 2010)
- Leadbeater, Charles, “We-Think” (Profile, 2008)
- Gibbons, Jemima, “Monkeys with Typewriters” (Triarchy, 2009)
Find out more: The Search for Leadership 2.0

Jemima Gibbons
Social media consultant and author of Monkeys with Typewriters (featured by BBC Radio 5 and the London Evening Standard). Get your social marketing up and running with my Social Media Launch Pack!
I think I have all of these!
Congrats Dave – you get 10/10 and a gold star!
I have only two of these books – Cluetrain Manifesto and Monkeys with Typewiters (natch!). Did I get the right two? 😉
A couple more to add: Thanks to @Jas (Jas Dhaliwal) on Twitter who reminded me about Nick Carr’s "The Big Switch" – a great book comparing the dawn of cloud computing to the invention of electricity.Also, the new book from Zappos boss, Tony Hsieh, "Delivering Happiness", which I’ve just ordered from Amazon and is all about creating a more people-centric environment at work – much in the same vein as Jason Fried’s "Rework" (pictured).
Ian – as Monkeys with Typewriters draws heavily on most of the others, you haven’t done too badly 😉
Thanks for the mention Jemima! I’m currently reading Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. But for anyone who is interested, I highly recommend his previous book, "Here Comes Everybody". An excellent book offering great insights into how people are using social media.