Best Books for Managers: 50 Picks Recommended by CEOs

Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and ran it as president, takes readers into Pixar’s Braintrust sessions, story meetings and postmortems, where managers keep honesty and candor alive inside a creative company. Mark Zuckerberg recommends it for its account of building a culture where creativity can grow.

Andrew Grove reduces running a company to the skill of managing, drawing on his Intel methods for management by objective, performance reviews, training and building productive teams. Mark Zuckerberg says it shaped his management style, and Tobi Lütke calls it close to a how-to manual.

Patrick Lencioni uses a fable about a new chief executive uniting a divided leadership team to set out five problems that sink teams, from absence of trust to inattention to results, with steps to fix each. Holger Seim says it turned his attention from his own output to the team’s.

Julie Zhuo became a manager at 25 and writes a field guide to the early years in the role, covering hiring and firing, meetings, planning and how to win the trust of reports. Mike Krieger wishes he had read it when he began managing at Instagram.

Peter Drucker judges executive work by whether the right things get done, and lists five learnable practices: managing time, choosing a contribution, using strengths, setting priorities and making effective decisions. Tim Ferriss rates it above nearly all time management books.

Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, who ran Google and its products, record what they learned about managing as the company grew, centered on hiring smart creatives and giving them room, with maxims on culture, talent and decisions. Gary Bury recommends it as a view inside a large tech company.

Spolsky, drawing on Microsoft and his own New York software company, sets out how to sort resumes, find strong candidates and interview developers, on the view that hiring the best programmers decides a software firm’s fate. Brendan Sterne praises its practical hiring advice.

Michael Bungay Stanier builds a manager’s daily coaching around seven questions, from the Kickstart question to the Learning question, arguing that asking more and advising less saves effort for managers and teams alike. Seth Godin calls it a modern classic.

Scott Berkun, a Microsoft veteran, spent time managing a small group of young developers at WordPress.com, where staff work from anywhere and seldom use email, and reports what that taught him about productivity and culture. Tim Ferriss suggests it for thinking differently about management.

Kim Scott, drawing on her years at Google and Apple, argues that a boss must care personally and challenge directly at once, and sorts feedback into four behaviors from ruinous empathy to radical candor. Gabriel Weinberg lists it among books that gave him lasting mental models.

Verne Harnish organizes the work of running a growing company around four decisions on people, strategy, execution and cash, backed by one-page tools such as the Rockefeller Habits Checklist. Iulia Ghita credits it with helping her team grow Bookster.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals make the employer’s case for letting a team work from anywhere, weighing gains such as a wider talent pool against the real challenges and showing how to set it up. Zack Onisko reread it while running a fully remote company.

John Doerr explains Objectives and Key Results, the goal-setting system he learned at Intel and later taught to Google’s founders, as a way to focus effort, link teams across silos and make every goal visible.

Sam Carpenter treats a business as a set of separate linear systems that an owner can document and refine one at a time, the method that cut his own working week to a single hour. Sa El values its focus on holding systems and people accountable.

Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle interviewed more than eighty people to record how the coach behind leaders at Google, Apple and Intuit built trust, encouraged courage and settled tensions in fast-moving teams. Sheryl Sandberg, whom he coached for several years, recommends it.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox teach the theory of constraints through a novel about Alex Rogo, a plant manager given three months to save his factory, who learns from a former professor how bottlenecks govern output. Jeff Bezos recommends it.

Alfred Sloan’s memoir of half a century at General Motors records how the company built its management policies on planning, financial growth and leadership, and many managers have treated it as a practical handbook. Ben Horowitz found it useful on problems of scale.

Marcus Buckingham and Cisco’s Ashley Goodall take apart nine common beliefs about work, among them that people crave feedback and that culture matters most, and argue that team strength and real-time intelligence count for more. Ali Abdaal recommends it to anyone leading a team.

Brian M. Carney and Isaac Getz profile leaders at Harley-Davidson, USAA, Gore and other firms who dropped command-and-control management for trust and freed employees to take initiative. Nicolae Andronic describes it as a study of liberated companies run without a traditional chain of command.

Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, consultants at McKinsey, studied 43 well-run American companies and distilled eight management themes, including staying close to customers, acting quickly and raising productivity through people. Aidan Connolly says it gave him a passion for management.

Dennis W. Bakke, co-founder of energy company AES, describes removing the divide between labor and management and pushing decisions down to the plant floor, so that every call made at the top counted as a lost chance to delegate. Joel Gascoigne recommends it.

Ricardo Semler describes taking over his family’s Brazilian manufacturer at 21 and letting employees set quotas and schedules, read the financial statements and share profits, collapsing twelve layers of hierarchy into three circles. Joel Gascoigne recommends it for the full story of that overhaul.

Twenty-six selections from Peter Drucker’s sixty years of writing cover management, the individual and society, including the information executives need and how to use time and strengths well. Audrey Russo says Drucker outlasts the trends that most business books follow.

Jack Stack explains open-book management, worked out on the factory floor of a nearly bankrupt International Harvester division, in which every employee learns the key numbers and holds a stake in results. Brian Scudamore credits it with teaching him the value of transparency with staff.

James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones set out five lean principles for operations, from specifying customer value and mapping value streams to flow, pull and removing waste, with cases from Porsche to Pratt & Whitney. Jeff Bezos has recommended it.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr. turns his years managing IBM’s System/360 and OS/360 into essays on running software projects, including Brooks’s law that adding programmers to a late project only makes it later. Jeff Bezos has recommended it.

Patty McCord, chief talent officer at Netflix, argues that companies get recruiting and team building wrong when they rely on perks, annual reviews and retention plans, and makes the case for candor and for parting with people who no longer fit. Arianna Huffington recommends it.

Zeynep Ton of MIT Sloan shows how QuikTrip, Costco, Trader Joe’s and Mercadona pair operational excellence with decent pay, training and steady schedules, keeping prices low while investing in employees. Doug McMillon lists it among the books that taught him most that year.

Steven G. Rogelberg uses research and surveys of more than 5,000 employees to show what separates good meetings from wasted hours, and sets out practices that managers and staff can use to improve them. Adam Grant calls him a leading expert on repairing meetings.

Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown contrast leaders who drain their people’s intelligence with those who amplify it, and from data on more than 150 leaders name five disciplines that get more from a team. Ben Chestnut recommends it as a book on leadership.

Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson update their short parable of a young man looking for an effective manager, who learns three habits for leading people, starting with one minute goals and one minute praisings. Bill Liao recommends it.

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan treat execution as the real job of running a business, a discipline tying together strategy, operations and people, and name selecting and appraising people as the leader’s main task. Faisal Amin highlights its case for giving up control to get things done.

Lou Adler sets out Performance-based Hiring, a method for matching the right person to any role that has been taught to tens of thousands of hiring managers, updated with new case studies and the internet’s part in recruiting. Madalina Uceanu cites Adler as an inspiration in headhunting.

Harvard Business Review gathers short tips from its Management Tip of the Day feature under three skills, managing oneself, leading a team and running a business, for busy managers to apply at once. Radu Marcusu calls it a handbook for every manager.

Michael Lopp’s stories from managing engineers at Apple, Netscape, Borland and Symantec cover handling a slacker, hiring, working with a boss, running meetings and holding a proper one-on-one. Dave Child calls it practical for developers moving into management.

John Shook, who spent years at Toyota, teaches A3 problem solving, the method behind lean management, through a dialogue between a manager and his boss, showing how to frame a problem, act on it and grow people the Toyota way. Daniel Buttner recommends it.

Richard Koch applies his 80/20 principle to the work of managing, telling overloaded managers with full inboxes and unfinished lists to concentrate on the few issues that drive most results and to work fewer hours. Cristian-Dragos Baciu recommends it.

Taiichi Ohno, credited with creating the Toyota Production System, combines his own reflections with a study of Toyota’s shift to lean production and just-in-time methods for cutting waste in operations. Grey Baker counts it as perhaps the one business book he has really loved.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street attack failed hiring with a method built from interviews with some 300 chief executives: define the outcomes a role must deliver, keep a steady supply of strong candidates and ask questions that separate them. Matthieu David-Experton found it useful for recruitment.

Ben Horowitz’s account of building and selling technology companies is mainly about the startup chief executive’s job, but its chapters on firing friends, recruiting from competitors and hiring managers speak directly to managers. Leah Lizarondo turned to it as her team kept growing.

Ray Dalio’s rules for life and for running Bridgewater Associates reach well beyond management, but they rest on radical truth and transparency in how teams decide, confront problems and get stronger. Reed Hastings says it changed his leadership style.

Michael E. Gerber writes mainly for small business owners, but his distinction between working on a business and in it, and his case for franchise-style systems, is about building operations that others can run. Daisy Jing says it taught her to delegate.

Marcus Buckingham and Gallup’s Donald O. Clifton build their StrengthsFinder assessment around developing talents instead of fixing flaws, an approach mainly for individuals that also applies to the people a manager leads. Sheryl Sandberg says it shaped how Facebook develops talent.

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith writes mainly about personal behavior, naming twenty habits that hold back successful people at work and a method for changing them, which bears directly on how managers treat their teams. James Clear recommends it.

Daniel Coyle studies group culture inside the San Antonio Spurs, Pixar, IDEO and SEAL Team Six and names three skills that build cohesion, adding advice on repairing a toxic culture and building trust. Charles Duhigg recommends it for understanding how successful groups work.

Three Weatherhead School of Management researchers led by Richard Boyatzis write about coaching for teachers, parents and managers alike, arguing that change lasts when it connects to a person’s positive vision of themselves instead of fixing problems. Daniel Goleman recommends it.

Three members of the Harvard Negotiation Project give a general method for hard talks, dealing with an underperforming employee among them: how to open without defensiveness, listen for what goes unsaid and stay balanced. Gabriel Weinberg keeps returning to it.

Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen focus on the person receiving feedback rather than the one giving it, a skill they apply to bosses and colleagues as well as family. Alan Echtenkamp suggests it for anyone facing a performance appraisal, which makes it useful on both sides of the review.

Peter M. Senge’s case for the learning organization is about whole companies, resting on systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, team learning and shared vision, and it gives managers a frame for helping teams learn faster. Josh Brewer recommends it from his years running startups.

Erin Meyer’s model for reading colleagues from other countries covers international business broadly, yet much of it concerns managing across cultures, from how criticism is delivered to how hierarchical a workplace feels. Paulo Rosado found it useful for his multinational team at OutSystems.