Accel5’s Business Book Summaries of the Month: January 2023

Add these summarized business books from Accel5 to your reading list.

This month’s collection covers a variety of essentials, including communicating effectively, trust and transparency, emotional intelligence and more, all briefed to be enjoyed in minutes.

 The Double Bottom Line
Donato Tramuto with Tami Booth Corwin

Summary: The world is changing, and the workforce is changing as well. To be successful in either, leaders also must change. In The Double Bottom Line, Donato Tramuto and Tami Booth Corwin contend that successful leaders will be those who lead with compassion. Filled with real-life success stories showcasing compassionate leadership, this book demonstrates that compassionate leadership is good for business and good for people.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Emotional Intelligence
• Leadership Essentials
• Listening
• Communicating Effectively
• Trust & Transparency

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on High Performance
Harvard Business Review

Summary: High performers aren’t born that way; they’re made. In HBR’s 10 Must Reads on High Performance, 28 experts and contributors to Harvard Business Review share their insights and perspectives on what it takes to be a high-performing employee, how you can become one, and how you as a leader can encourage high performance in others.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Goals & Priorities
• Leadership Essentials
• Results Driven

Improve Your Communication Skills
Alan Barker

Summary: Communication is often thought of as the process of sending and receiving information. But what if that’s the wrong way to look at it? In his book Improve Your Communication Skills, Alan Barker challenges the way people, particularly leaders, think about communication. He breaks down communication and then rebuilds it in a new framework of thinking for how leaders should communicate, providing actionable steps and exercises along the way to help new and seasoned leaders communicate more meaningfully.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Communicating Effectively

Living on Purpose: Five Deliberate Choices to Realize Fulfillment and Joy
Amy Eliza Wong

Summary: Many people feel like they’re simply surviving rather than thriving. The good news, however, is that it’s possible to make intentional choices that will contribute to a happier life. In Living on Purpose, Amy Eliza Wong offers a roadmap that will enable you to consciously create the life that you really want.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Emotional Intelligence
• Bias for Action
• Positive Outlook
• Goals & Priorities

Success From Anywhere
Karen Mangia

Summary: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many of the unproductive assumptions layered into our previous notions of success and failure. In Success from Anywhere, Karen Mangia argues that it’s time to rethink our individual and collective definitions of success to build a smarter, brighter post-pandemic world.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Emotional Intelligence
• Goals & Priorities
• Stress Management
• Trust & Transparency

Return on Ambition
Nicolai Chen Nielsen and Nicolai Tillisch

Summary: Ambition can be a double-edged sword: It can help you reach great heights of achievement or plunge you into a painful setback. In Return on Ambition, Nicolai Chen Nielsen and Nicolai Tillisch explain how you can “get more bang for your buck” when it comes to ambition by understanding and leveraging the driving forces that underlie it. Through a proven, innovative process of reflective self-coaching, you can learn to make the right choices, obtain a higher return from your ambition investment, and lead a more fulfilling life.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Goals & Priorities
• Results Driven

Fostering Innovation
Andrew Laudato

Summary: With IT at the center of nearly every business growth plan, companies need an IT team that can both handle challenges and innovate for success. In Fostering Innovation, Andrew Laudato offers detailed and prescriptive advice on how to build and run a strong IT department. He discusses various tools and techniques for improving your company’s IT function, devising your leadership strategy, and creating a winning departmental culture. The book is for IT leaders and CEOs who want to build an innovative, best-in-class IT department that gives their companies a strong competitive advantage.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Innovation

Women and Leadership
Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Summary: Far too few women hold leadership positions in our world. No female leader has ever taken the helm of the United Nations or World Bank. Many world-power countries have never had a female president or prime minister. In fact, 70 percent of the nations on our planet have always had a man in charge. In corporate settings, board rooms, and even in Hollywood, the problem persists: Women aren’t being recognized, promoted, supported, or granted leadership authority. In Women and Leadership, Julia Gillard, the first female prime minister of Australia and chair of multiple esteemed health and education organizations, and Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman to serve as Nigeria’s Finance Minister and Foreign Minister, call attention to how the odds are stacked against the nearly 4 billion females living on the planet today, and why the world is suffering because of it. They also weigh in on the worryingly slow rate that the gender gap in leadership roles is closing. Diving right into ideas for progress, these women name the obstacles that keep women from becoming leaders of the world and workplace and offer actionable ideas for quickening the pace for progress.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Leadership Essentials
• Diversity

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
Adam Grant

Summary: Psychologists say there are two paths to achievement. The first path follows conventional wisdom, or the wisdom of the crowd, and allows us to deliver a great form of what’s expected. This is the path that’s most frequently traveled by the risk-averse and those who take comfort in the status quo. The second path is where we decide to serve up a novel idea or one that goes against the grain of conventional thinking. Unfortunately, these original ideas often face resistance when shared with others. When there’s no guarantee of success, investors tend to shy away, as do leaders and organizations that prefer their default, go-to ways of doing business. In Originals, Adam Grant, recognized widely as the best-selling author of Give and Take and Think Again, explains how we can position ourselves to find our own original ideas, act on them, and rally our employees, investors, and others to believe in something new and better. The work isn’t simple—it’s challenging to come up with something out of the norm, much less deliver on it. However, Grant offers proven techniques and best practices to help us through these hardships and deliver something truly different.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Creativity
• Innovation
• Entrepreneurial Mindset

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
General Stanley McChrystal

Summary: In a world that’s changing at a breakneck pace, it can be tough for leaders to prepare their teams for all the possible scenarios they might face. There’s seldom time to find perfect solutions, much less to draw up full-scale battle plans to take them on. This was U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s experience in Iraq and Afghanistan during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Recognizing quickly that its wealth of resources and in-depth training weren’t enough to swiftly overcome enemy forces, the Joint Special Operations Task Force was forced to adapt its strategies to an environment it hadn’t planned to fight within. Because of its commitment to its mission, the task force evolved in rapid iterations by changing and assessing until it had morphed into an entity that could emerge victorious. Later, when leaders found the bandwidth to study the task force’s successes and setbacks, they drew conclusions on how their outcomes were affected by timing, will, and the strengths and strongholds of the opposition. McChrystal recognized that these lessons are translatable for virtually every organization, all of which are part of complex, rapidly changing environments. He’s organized these lessons learned in Team of Teams to help leaders like us examine the new challenges we’re up against, what matters most today, and how we must organize to survive and thrive through this era.

For those looking to improve upon these competencies:

• Managing Teams
• Collaboration & Teamwork
• Trust & Transparency