I'm a creative and I'm surrounded by creatives at work, but my heartbeat is to lead creatives better. I want to understand people, make better decisions, help a team grow, and follow through on work that matters.
Some of these books are about business, some about behavior, and some about designing experiences. They belong together because leading well requires more than being good at your own craft. Choose a book based on the problem you are working through right now and keep chasing that elusive dream. Here's to hoping you wake up one day and realize: you're living it.
Leading people and bringing them together
Leadership includes how we listen, what we make room for, and whether the people around us grow. These books approach that work from different angles.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey
A broad foundation for personal responsibility, priorities, listening, and working with other people. It belongs here because being effective as a leader starts with how you approach your own decisions and relationships.
Read it for: Building a foundation for how you lead and work.
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
Priya Parker
A different way to think about meetings, events, and time together: begin with a clear purpose and make choices around the people and experience. Especially relevant when planning an event involves much more than getting everyone into the same room.
Read it for: Making gatherings purposeful.
Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us
Seth Godin
About connecting people around shared ideas and giving a community direction. Useful when the challenge is helping people move together, whether or not you have a formal leadership title.
Read it for: Building community and inviting people into a shared purpose.
With: A Practical Guide to Informal Mentoring and Intentional Disciple Making
Alvin L. Reid and George G. Robinson
A Christian approach to mentoring through shared everyday life, rather than waiting for a formal program or a perfect teaching setting. A useful fit for people who want to invest in someone else while doing the work and living the life already in front of them.
Read it for: Mentoring and intentional discipleship.
Understanding business and improving judgment
Doing good work also means understanding the larger system: how value is created, how decisions happen, and what we tend to overlook when explaining success.
The Personal MBA
Josh Kaufman
A wide-ranging introduction to business concepts, including value creation, marketing, sales, finance, people, and systems. A useful place to start when you want to understand how your piece of the work connects to the organization around it.
Read it for: Business fundamentals and a broader view of the work.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell
Explores the judgments we make quickly, including situations where intuition helps and situations where it misleads. A prompt to examine what sits behind a confident first impression, rather than assuming speed makes a decision either brilliant or careless.
Read it for: Thinking more carefully about intuition.
Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
Looks beyond individual talent to the opportunities, environments, timing, and cultural context that contribute to achievement. Particularly useful as a counterweight to stories that explain every outcome entirely through personal effort.
Read it for: Recognizing the conditions that help people succeed.
Great by Choice
Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
Examines organizations that performed strongly amid uncertainty, with an emphasis on disciplined action and how leaders respond to circumstances they cannot control. Relevant when the plan has to survive changing conditions.
Read it for: Leading and making decisions under uncertainty.
Building habits, learning, and following through
Motivation is helpful, but it is unreliable as an entire operating system. These books look at the patterns and beliefs that shape what we keep doing.
Atomic Habits
James Clear
A practical approach to making useful behaviors easier to repeat and unwanted behaviors harder to maintain. Its focus on small changes and the systems around them makes it a useful companion to a goal that otherwise stays abstract.
Read it for: Turning intentions into repeatable behavior.
The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg
Explores how habits develop in individuals and organizations, including the cue–routine–reward framework. Pair it with Atomic Habits if you want both a broader explanation of habit patterns and practical ideas for changing your own.
Read it for: Understanding why routines persist.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Carol S. Dweck
Examines the difference between treating ability as fixed and treating it as something that can develop. Relevant to feedback, learning, and the way leaders talk to people who are still building competence.
Read it for: Creating room for learning and improvement.
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Angela Duckworth
Explores sustained interest and persistence toward long-term goals. A useful lens for projects and skills that take more than an enthusiastic beginning, especially alongside the judgment to decide which goals still deserve that effort.
Read it for: Staying with meaningful work over time.
Doing creative work and shaping experiences
This is where the creative side connects back to leadership: making a useful contribution, sustaining the work, and thinking carefully about what people experience.
The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice
Todd Henry
About developing practices that support creative work when ideas are expected on a schedule. A good fit for people whose work requires consistent thinking and output, even when inspiration is not conveniently available.
Read it for: Sustaining creative work under real demands.
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
Seth Godin
A call to contribute judgment, initiative, and human connection rather than only following instructions. The useful question is what you can bring to the work that a checklist cannot fully prescribe.
Read it for: Taking ownership and making a meaningful contribution.
The Power of Moments
Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Explores why certain experiences become especially memorable and how to be more intentional about creating them. Relevant to events, team milestones, recognition, and the moments that shape how someone feels about an organization.
Read it for: Designing experiences that matter.
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
Daniel H. Pink
Looks at timing as part of how we plan work and experiences, including daily rhythms, breaks, and beginnings and endings. A useful reminder to ask when something should happen alongside what needs to happen.
Read it for: Thinking more deliberately about timing.
Where I would start
For a broad foundation, start with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or Grit. For a practical change you can work on immediately, try Atomic Habits. If your next responsibility is a meeting or event, The Art of Gathering gives you a different set of questions to bring into the planning.
Take something useful back to the work
A book becomes more useful when an idea turns into a better conversation, a clearer decision, a routine you can sustain, or an experience you plan differently. Pick one thing to try before moving straight to the next stack of advice.
One of these kinds of books usually travels with me. For everything else in that work-and-travel setup, see what I actually pack in my camera bags.