As Founder and Director of Creating Dynamic, I’m passionate about highlighting how I have benefited from ‘learning on the move’, both for individuals and teams, using business audiobooks.
In my opinion, management and leadership is about getting the best out of people and ensuring a strong culture, with positive engagement from all colleagues within a business.
I have tried many ways to achieve this and the most cost-effective and simple way, I have found, is to listen to business audiobooks, especially if you do it as a team or group of managers, each listening to the same book over a month. At agreed intervals, the group then can discuss the contents in terms of practices and learning outcomes and implement these improvements into their individual lives, as well as within the team and the company. A win win solution.
Why audiobooks?
How Audible Works
Audible is a monthly subscription model whereby you pay for a credit each month, and for that credit, you can choose one of the many titles. Alternatively, you can pay for 24 credits in one go at the cost of £90.83 excluding VAT. To sign up, you need your own Audible account.
Recommended business audiobooks
Below is a brief summary of the business audiobooks that I consider to be essential reading for team leaders, managers, both junior and senior and anyone else that aspires in becoming an excellent leader.
Good luck on your journey to creating a dynamic team of individuals, focused on the common purpose of delivering excellent results for their business.
My selections have been grouped around six core reading themes:
Behavioural Skills
The Chimp Paradox – Prof Steve Peters Length: 9 hours and 45 minutes
Focuses on: how impulsive behaviour or nagging self-doubt can impact negatively on our professional and personal lives. And the benefits of phenomenally successful mind-management programme.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey Length: 13 hours and 4 minutes
Focuses on: proven principles of fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity.
Eat That Frog – Brian Tracy Length: 2 hours and 37 minutes
Focuses on: successful people don’t try to do everything. They learn to focus on the most important tasks and make sure those get done. They eat their frogs, learning how to organize each day so you can zero in on these critical tasks and accomplish them efficiently and effectively.
12 Rules for Life – An Antidote to Chaos – Jordan B. Peterson Length: 15 hours and 39 minutes
Focuses on: about the value of individual responsibility, based on 12 profound and practical principles for how to live a meaningful life.
High Performance Habits – How Extraordinary People Become That Way – Brendon Burchard Length: 10 hours and 35 minutes
Focuses on: six habits that will make you extraordinary.
Emotional Intelligence: Improve and Gain EQ Skills for Beginners – David Wilson Length: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Focuses on: being unable to have meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships and how to unlock the secret to understanding human emotions and getting what you want from people?
Team Building
Radical Candor – Kim Scott Length: 9 hours and 23 minutes
Focuses on: a new approach to effective management that delivers huge success by inspiring teams to work better together by embracing fierce conversations, called Radical Candor.
The Culture Code – The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups – Daniel Coyle Length: 6 hours and 44 minutes
Focuses on: why Pixar, Google and the San Antonio Spurs basketball team all owe their extraordinary success to their team-building skills.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – A Leadership Fable – Patrick Lencioni Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins
Focuses on: overcoming the human behavioural tendencies that he says corrupt teams (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results).
Change Management
Who Moved My Cheese – Dr Spencer Johnson Length: 1 hour and 39 minutes
Focuses on: Learning how to anticipate, adapt to and enjoy change and be ready to change quickly whenever you need to. Enjoy less stress and more success in your work and life.
Drive – The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us – Daniel H. Pink Length: 5 hours and 53 minutes
Focuses on: changing how you think and transforming how you live.
The Joy of Work – 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job Again – Bruce Daisley Length: 6 hours and 55 minutes
Focuses on: how to enjoy your job, utilising 30 succinct tips that range across all aspects of 21st-century office life and that combine inspiration, empirically tested insight and down-to-earth practical answers in equal measure.
Engagement
Build It – The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement – Glenn Elliott & Debra Corey Length: 6 hours and 46 minutes
Focuses on: courage, commitment and a people-centric mindset, rather than money and resources, are what you need to turn an average business into a category leader. Success is based on the Engagement Bridge model.
Five Stars – The Communication Secrets to Get From Good to Great – Carmine Gallo Length: 8 hours and 43 minutes
Focuses on: mastering the art of persuasion since ideas don’t sell themselves.
Performance
Bringing Out the Best in People – How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement, Third Edition – Aubrey C. Daniels Length: 7 hours and 53 minutes
Focuses on: Maximize employee performance
Combo Prospecting – The Powerful One-Two Punch That Fills Your Pipeline and Wins Sales – Tony J. Hughes Length: 8 hours and 6 minutes
Focuses on: a killer combination of old and new sales strategies, to show how you break through to impossible-to-reach executive buyers who are intent on blocking out the noise that confronts them every day
To Sell Is Human – The Surprising Truth about Persuading, Convincing and Influencing Others – Daniel H. Pink Length: 6 hours and 6 minutes
Focuses on: the fact that we’re all in sales now and he explores the ways in which we can all improve our sales skills in every area of our lives and identifies the three personal qualities and four essential skills necessary to move people.
Negotiation Genius – How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond – Deepak Malhotra, Max Bazerman Length: 11 hours and 58 minutes
Focuses on: the mental habits and proven strategies you need to achieve outstanding results in any negotiation.
Leadership
Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek Length: 7 hours and 12 minutes
Focuses on: why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike?
Dare to Lead – Brené Brown Length: 8 hours and 10 minutes
Focuses on: new research conducted with leaders, change makers and culture shifters and how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead.
Traction – Get a Grip on Your Business – Gino Wickman Length: 6 hours and 56 minutes
Focuses on: the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which is a practical method for achieving the business success you have always envisioned.
Great by Choice – Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All – T Hansen, Jim Collins Length: 8 hours and 33 minutes
Focuses on: why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, they enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.
How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In – Jim Collins Length: 4 hours and 40 minutes
Focuses on: how decline can be avoided, detected and reversed, uncovering five step-wise stages of decline, so that by understanding these stages of decline, leaders can substantially reduce their chances of falling all the way to the bottom. Great companies can stumble, badly, and recover.
Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works – Roger L. Martin, A.G. Lafley Length: 7 hours and 9 minutes
Focuses on: the strategy he used to restore P&G to its former dominance., using five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors.
Coaching for Performance: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership – Sir John Whitmore Length: 8 hours and 4 minutes
Focuses on: what is recognised as the founding text of today’s billion-dollar coaching industry, featuring the seminal GROW model and the associated Coaching for Performance model.
The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded – Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter – Michael Watkins Length: 6 hours and 58 minutes
Focuses on: the world’s most trusted guide for leaders in transition.
And finally
Good to Great – Jim Collins – A must-read or listen to for company boards, C-suite, Non-Executive Directors and Senior Leadership teams, but
Focuses on: being an essential read for any team that is leading and delivering a company’s strategy, highlighting the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good.
Find out how Creating Dynamic helped one company thrive through Traction and get in touch to discover how we can do the same for you.
