These 7 Books Are Required Reading For Founders

We constantly hear founders say they don't have time to read. If this is you, we encourage you to rethink your position and make the time.  

Why? Because reading is learning and leaders should "always be learning".  

Research has found that reading is a common habit among ultra-successful people.  These people, no doubt, are also "ultra-busy" but still manage to carve out time to read. Indeed, Bill Gates reads a book a week, Zuck reads two books a week, and Oprah loves reading so much she started the world's largest book club. 

Still claim you are too busy? New studies indicate that if you replaced all your time spent perusing social media over the course of the past year with reading, you could have finished 200 books!

As a founder, your job is to not only grow your company but to improve yourself and shape yourself into the best leader you can be. There are several thousand books published each year on leadership alone. Reading just a handful of these can go a long way towards fine-tuning your leadership style and skills.

As always, we are here to help you on your journey. To kick off 2018, we have curated 7 books (some newish and some classics) that we believe should be required reading for all entrepreneurs: 

• Radical Candor - Frameworks and tools for leadership, management and culture-building, with best practices from tech giants Google, Apple and Twitter.

• Principles - Gold nugget after gold nugget -  a hedge fund king shares his values, rules and systems for life and work.  

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things- Ben Horowitz provides an honest and accurate depiction of the struggles of being a founder / CEO, with insights and advice along the way.

• Primal Leadership -  Explains why emotional intelligence is so important for effective leadership and provides a competency model for self-assessment.

• Crucial Conversations - Tools and techniques for holding healthy high-stakes conversations and getting your team to do the same.

• 5 Dysfunctions of a Team - A timeless classic that outlines the root causes of dysfunctional teams and provides tips for avoiding and overcoming them. 

• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People -  Another timeless classic that provides the why and how of 7 Habits that will make you a more effective human and leader.  

For more book recommendations, check out our FounderForward Bookshelf.