Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink -> https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs-eboo...

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek -> https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Eat-Last-Together-Others/dp/B...

Leaders Eat Last was one of the best books I read this year. Extreme Ownership was also quite good but Simon really explains the “Why” of leadership that most books are missing. High-Output Management is another classic.

You should really check out Simon Senik's new book [Leaders Eat Last](https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Eat-Last-Together-Others/dp/1...).

It's essentially Marine Corp leadership philosophy distilled fitted to business scenarios.

Everything by Simon Sinek, but most important for me is "Leaders Eat Last" [0]. I haven't read the last one (The Infinite Game), but I've heard it's pretty good as well.

Also Extreme Ownership [1] and Dichotomy of Leadership [2] by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

All of these books had tremendous impact on me as a leader and I highly recommend them.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Eat-Last-Together-Others/dp/B...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs-eboo...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Dichotomy-Leadership-Balancing-Challe...

Leaders Eat Last. A very good book by Simon Sinek but based on an old Marine Corps principal.

While other services have 'head of line privileges' - basically the more senior you are the more you can cut in line to get food at chow time. In the Marines, you always line up most junior to more senior.

It drives home the responsibility leaders have to take care of the people who follow them.

The article was excerpted from "Reprinted from “Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t”"

And your comment pretty much illustrates why I have pretty much stopped reading and buying books (such as this which I did in the past)

You get (even when supported) a generally lopsided view based on what the owner thinks that is cherry picked to match with their point of view or what they are trying to prove.

(By the way as far as "Why the sudden and huge spike in a frontal lobe dysfunction over the course of a decade?" Well, that would be pharmaceutical marketing for sure! (My cherry picked boogey man to explain.)

+1 Extreme Ownership
+1 How to make friends and influence people

Leaders eat Last by Simon Sinek

Books by Adam Grant and his podcast. He is a brilliant organizational behavioral psychologist from Wharton. Even his Thursday advice tweets are great.

I highly recommend two of his podcast episodes. One on trust which featured an international team of astronauts that had to bond for a major mission in a very short time. The second on all stars and humility about an NBA player with 2 championship rings who makes everyone else on his team perform better when he's on the floor.

http://softwareleadweekly.com/ - A weekly newsletter, as well as Slack group - great resource.

Books:

- Leaders Eat Last

- Managing Humans

- What Got You Here, Won't Get You There

- Radical Focus

- Leading Snowflakes: The Engineering Manager Handbook

- The Manager's Path

- The Coaching Habit

- Thanks for the Feedback

I haven't been in that precise position, but I have been in other leadership positions. The biggest lesson I've had to learn is: it's all about the people. First and foremost, leading is a social skill (although there are of course technical components involved too). As a leader, your job is to care for your followers. For a person who is as task-oriented as I used to be (and you seem to be similar), that is a tedious lesson to learn. But once you've learnt it, it turns out to also be very rewarding to you personally.

Two books that really helped me:

- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (John Maxwell)

- Leaders Eat Last (Simon Sinek)

Simon Sinek has an interesting hypothesis about the cause of the breakdown in politics in his book "Leaders Eat Last". I'm giving a very brief summary, but in that book he suggested that most US federal politicians used to live a lot of their careers in Washington DC, attend similar social events and send their children to the same schools, which helped them relate to each other (across party lines). It is suggested that the closeness created decency and civility between them, but now that a lot of them still live in their home states, they no longer see the opposition as similar to themselves, and it's become a "us vs them" kind of thing for everything.

- Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek
- Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull
- Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux
- Joy at Work, Dennis W Bakke
- Valve Employee Handbook, Valve Software

This list is heavily skewed toward self-organization because I work for a company (Zappos) that is currently transitioning to a self-organization model. I thought I'd answer the question about what books I wish my "manager" would read even though I don't have a manager because in a self-org environment, you do have leaders that emerge organically. The main difference between "manager" and "leader" is that managers influence their charges with coersion (even if subtle and unintentional) while a leaders ability to influence comes from the bottom-up and is more meritocratic based on perceived experience and ability by those being led.

Most companies hope to promote the leaders so their manager structure is reflective of the actual effective social leadership structure, but all companies get it wrong often.