Center for Transformational Leadership

A brief annotated list of interesting books related to leadership in various ways.
It is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, and will be added to over time.

- Jonathan Reams

Michael Ray: “The Highest Goal. The Secrete that Sustains You in Every Moment”
Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., 2004

This book combines the insights from over 25 years of teaching creativity in business at Stanford University. The result is an easy to read and profound map and tools for keeping your attention on your Self (highest aspect or essence of who you are) and your Work (the purpose you came into this world for).

Otto Scharmer: “Theory U”
Society for Organizational Learning, 2007

This book is the result of years of inquiring into how deep change can actually happen. It describes how individual and collective consciousness can move from downloading past mental patterns through seeing with fresh eyes to opening our hearts and being able to listen to what our highest self wants to emerge from the future. It then describes how we can nurture these insights and bring them into action in the world.

Bill Torbert: “Action Inquiry”
Berrett-Koehler, 2004

Action Inquiry is a way of understanding how to increase one’s capacity for reflective awareness within activity. This book is based on over 30 years research into how the logic behind our actions evolves through specific stages and the impact this development can have on leadership capacity. (The first two chapters are available Action Inquiry)

Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs: “Leadership Agility”
Jossey-Bass, 2007

This book explores some of the same territory as Torbert’s Action Inquiry, but focuses on the concept of agility and gives rich illustrations of how leaders can move through the stages of development in different areas of agility.

Ronald Heifetz: “Leadership Without Easy Answers”
Harvard University Press, 1994

This book frames leadership as the capacity to create a holding environment that enables people to learn how to take responsibility for creating solutions to their own issues. He also shows how this can be done through either formal authority of positional leadership or informal authority of influence.

Robert Greenleaf: “Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness”
Paulist Press, 1977

This book is a collection of seminal essays from Robert Greenleaf’s early work which defined the notion of the leader as first a servant. It has been highly influential and inspiring to many of the top figures in the study of leadership.

Max DePree: “Leadership is an Art”
Dell, 1989

This book is full of short chapters and stories highlighting a view of leadership that relies on the ability to simply work well with people and support their growth. Bill Clinton loved it.

Harrison Owen: “The Power of Spirit. How Organizations Transform”
Berrett-Koehler, 2000

Owen uses the power of stories to show how Spirit is a common thing in organizational life that we all know about and experience. He describes what he calls “soul pollution” as the actions that suppress and contaminate the innate qualities of the human spirit, and shows how this understanding can be used to generate profound change in organizations.

Margaret Wheatley: “Leadership and the New Science. Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe”
Berrett-Koehler, 1993

This book was voted one of the five best leadership books of the 1990’s. It examines insights from three areas of new findings in science and applies those insights to leadership and organizational life.

Harald Harung. “Invincible Leadership. Building Peak Performance Organizations by Harnessing the Unlimited Power of Consciousness”
Maharishi University of Management Press, 1999

This book outlines a specific view of how the alignment of consciousness in individuals and organizations can lead to high performance. It comes from the Transcendental Meditation movement, and is backed by significant amounts of research done on the effects of higher states of consciousness.

Don Beck & Christopher Cowan: “Spiral Dynamics. Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change”
Blackwell, 1996

This book is an in depth and sophisticated examination of the ways in which consciousness evolves and how that evolution shapes the ways we act in the world. This understanding is applied to how leadership can work effectively to bring health to all aspects of human systems.

Michael Browning and Don Armour: “Systems Sensitive Leadership. How to Empower Diversity Without Polarizing the Church”
College Press, 1998

This book is based on the same research as Spiral Dynamics, but is focused more directly on leadership and working with diverse levels of consciousness within church settings. It is a great introduction to how developmental theory can be applied to leadership.

Debashis Chatterjee: “Leading Consciously. A Pilgrimage Toward Self-Mastery”
Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998

This book takes the spiritual perspectives of Eastern philosophies like Hinduism and Buddhism and shows how the development of higher stages of awareness are supported by self discipline and mastery, and how this builds the capacity for leadership.

Dale Carnegie: “How to Win Friends and Influence People”
Pocket Books. Simon and Schuster Inc., 1936/1881.

This is a classic book. It contains much common sense on what it takes to be a good person. While on one level the book may appear to be full of techniques for manipulating people, what it is really doing is showing how you have to be authentic in everything you do with people, and it is this authenticity that allows the techniques to actually work.

Jim Collins: “Good to Great”
HarperCollins Publishers, 2001

Collin compares performance of companies over a long time, 15+15 yrs, where originally comparative companies start differing after 15 yrs so that one of them develops/performs significantly better for the next 15 yrs, and identifies reasons for this behavior. One of the factors was type of management/leadership. Several examples from the real world.

W. Edward Deming: “Out of the Crisis”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1982/1986

Deming was one of the gurus who helped Japan refurnish its industry after World War II. His principles had been rejected by American industry who took the attitude they had nothing to learn. The Japanese came from another tradition and culture and did exactly as Deming recommended – and after some years the Japanese had overcome the Americans in quality and profitability. The book explains in detail the importance of quality and how to manage it in an organization.

Anthony DeMello: “Awareness. The Perils and Opportunities of Reality”
Doubleday Books, 1990

This book is a transcript of a seminar by Fr. Anthony DeMello, an Indian Jesuit priest who “woke up” and saw the message hidden in all sacred scriptures. His provocative method helps readers to wake up themselves, and to recognize the power that awareness itself has to heal and bring spiritual growth.

Alex Pattakos: “Prisoners of Our Thoughts”
Berrett-Koehler, 2004

This book is based on the work of Victor Frankel, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. It provides ten simple steps for understanding how we can become trapped by our thinking, and emphasizes that in each moment we have a choice in what attitude we take to any given situation.