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Three books for you, the remarkable leader

With a plethora of reading material out there, what are smart leaders and linchpins supposed to be reading. Looking at the top ten lists on business sites and book sites only places you in with the crowd. You want to be leading, at the edges, pushing boundaries and deepening your perspective. Well, here are 3 books that do exactly that:

The Puritan Gift, by Hopper & Hopper

Of course you want to start by building a great company. But, how? Let history be your teacher. Think about how business feels today, to most people. It didn’t always feel so foriegn, detached from the rest of our life. The shenanigans of Wall Street and mantras of Dragon’s Den are a recent phenomona. This book, by two brothers (an engineer and an investment banker) provides an insight into one of the greatest periods of capitalism: 1870-1970. The book was a top business book of the year awhile back, but unlike many of the “top business books” of the year, this is more a book for the ages. It’s a bloomin’ onion of complexity and depth. If you are in a hurry, it’s a competent management treatise full of lots of examples. If you have a bit more time, you will begin to see how truly purpose built businesses were built. And if you are willing to let the text marinate in your mind, a world of intrinsic value based capitalism will blow your mind. Yes, blow your mind. You will see a complex universe of long-term strategies playing out for both the companies and society.

This book actually changed my life. It could also change yours.

Businesses used to be the bright stars of our childhood galaxies - connected to our world, not separate from us, but part of us. In this way, most companies looked after their people, their community, and the wider world. Shareholders were beneficiaries, not drivers. The reason to read this book is simple. You will understand what it takes to build a truly great company with a long-term vision that will create a positive legacy.

Small Giants, by Bo Birlingham

Build a great, but also remarkable company. This is the book you will wish you read when at the start of your entrepreneurial or leadership journey. But, maybe you would have thrown it into the bin as irrelevant to your growth equals success training. If The Puritan Gift is the blueprint for how to build a great business that benefits both society and shareholders, this is your map for a direction of travel for your company. This book, like many others of its genre, reminds you of what it means to be in business. Building something big usually leads to mediocrity. Deciding to remain human scale and important or special, whatever that means for your sector, can mean the difference between being remarkable or vacant.

Don’t misunderstand.

This is not the seminal book for cottage industry entrepreneurs. Small, in the title, could be replaced with beautiful or remarkable. The stories of successful and remarkable businesses do share a common decision - to be special, instead of big - but small is relative. From Anchor Steam brewery in San Francisco to a fairly large picture frame manufacturer to a one person fashion business; something for everyone.

It’s funny, business school is full of lectures and books and thinking that worships scale. We are manufacturing robot entrepreneurs. Bo reminds us what makes humanness so great - we can be awesome without being massive. I recommend this book because we need you to think like Bo and the companies he profiles. We need you to be remarkable.

Art of Happiness, by HH the Dalai Lama

Build a great, remarkable and purposeful company. Building great, remarkable businesses is hard work. Our parents usually tell us that anything worth doing usually is. Scaling is so much easier. But, entrepreneurs building the future will be taking the path less trampled, they will do the hard graft to make remarkable businesses - leaving the dinosaurs to scale up to their demise.

To lead us on this journey, you will need a guide.

Not a business coach. Not a chairman. Not even a non-exec pastor. You will need a guide operating at a level beyond business. Why? Because business is easy, being remarkable is hard. That’s why I recommend every leader, linchpin, or entrepreneur read this amazingly simple, but powerful book by the Dalai Lama. Far from what you may think - this is not a treatise on spirituality, but rather an accessible guide to purposeful work. And purposeful work is the highest level of business you can create. And spoiler alert: it’s also the most profitable, durable, and impactul.

Reading this book will broaden your perspective, deepen your understanding of people (the lifeblood of businesses), and keep you grounded while becoming remarkable.

+Bonus Book: The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz

Since you are building a people focused, remarkable business, you will need an HR guide to help you manage in a variety of environments. Yes, you will need to delegate many facets of the business, but delegation should be grounded in some principles. This book is the simple list of principles to guide your team. Forget the silly lists that most businesses write into their mission statements and guiding values; trust, loyalty, equality, etc. Those lists are meaningless to a great extent because you can’t say you are trustworthy - others say whether you are trustworthy. What you can say is “these are the foundation principles we adhere to create a fantastic company, that you may find trustworthy.”

You are building relationships with your team and your customers. You need a relationship guide.

This book has become a seminole book of spiritual people, but it’s lessons are highly effective in people management and business culture. We have used the principles in this book to remind our team about what’s important to us, our customers and society. Like the other books on this list, the messages are deceptively simple as they are slightly more difficult to implement. That’s good news for the remarkable entrepreneur, because in this case difficulty results in specialness.

So go on. Build a remarkable business. Make us stand up and notice your work.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Todd Hannula .