BOOK REVIEWS

CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest | Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra

CEO Excellence offers a rare, practical guide to what makes the world’s top CEOs successful. Drawing on interviews with 67 elite leaders—including Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Reed Hastings (Netflix), and Mary Barra (GM)—the book distils insights from a pool of 2,400 CEOs into actionable mindsets and behaviours. It reveals why leading a global company is one of the toughest jobs in business, where billions and thousands of careers are at stake, and why many fail quickly. Through candid conversations, the authors uncover strategies that drive exceptional performance, making this an indispensable manual for anyone aspiring to lead at the highest level.

Multipliers| Liz Wiseman

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman explains why some leaders stifle talent while others amplify it. Diminishers drain energy and ideas, while Multipliers unlock intelligence and inspire innovation. Based on research with 150 leaders, Wiseman identifies five disciplines anyone can learn:

1. Talent Magnet – Attract and fully leverage top talent.

2. Liberator – Create a safe yet demanding environment for people’s best thinking.

3. Challenger – Stretch teams with bold opportunities and hard questions.

4. Debate Maker – Drive rigorous, inclusive discussions for sound decisions.

5. Investor – Give ownership and resources while holding people accountable.

Packed with real-world examples and practical strategies, this updated edition adds insights on accidental Diminishers and how to manage them. Multipliers is a roadmap for leaders who want to harness collective intelligence and achieve extraordinary results.

Impact Players | Liz Wiseman

What’s an Impact Player, Anyway?

Impact Players, as Wiseman defines them, are the people at work who don’t just solve problems—they create opportunities, lift others, and bring a contagious energy that inspires those around them. These people don’t wait to be told what to do, nor do they limit themselves to their job descriptions. They adapt quickly, take on challenges, and see each obstacle as a chance to learn and grow. These aren’t always the people with fancy titles or big offices, but they’re the ones you go to when you want something done right.

Impact Players by Liz Wiseman shows how to move beyond doing good work to becoming indispensable. Based on research and real-world examples, Wiseman identifies what sets high-impact contributors apart: they don’t just execute tasks—they anticipate needs, tackle challenges, and create opportunities. Impact Players adapt quickly, take ownership, and elevate those around them, making themselves invaluable without burning out. This book is a practical guide for anyone who wants to lead, play bigger, and multiply their impact at work.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable: A Leadership Fable| Patrick Lencioni 

Equal parts leadership fable and business handbook, this definitive source on teamwork by Patrick Lencioni reveals the five behavioural tendencies that go to the heart of why even the best teams struggle. He offers a powerful model and step-by-step guide for overcoming those dysfunctions and getting every one rowing in the same direction. Today, the lessons in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team are more relevant than ever.

Reimagine Finance: The CFO's Leadership Playbook for the Age of AI, Data, and Digital | Tariq Munir 

Reinvent the future of finance leadership: An imperative to lead in the Digital Age

Reimagine Finance: A CFO’s Playbook to Leading in the Age of Data and AI by Tariq Munir empowers today's finance leaders to navigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape with confidence and clarity. As the finance function faces increasing demands for strategic involvement beyond traditional roles, this book provides CFOs with battle-tested strategies to redesign and co-create the digital operating model, lead transformation, and turn finance into a strategic growth catalyst―while fostering a culture of innovation.

Drawing from years of research, interviews with senior leaders, and real-world case studies, this book is a comprehensive guide to equip CFOs with the tools and mindset needed to transform siloed structures into an interconnected, data-driven network. The book demonstrates how digital capabilities like cloud computing, data democratisation, artificial intelligence, process mining, and the Internet of Things reshape the finance, business, and the competitive landscape. Throughout, it offers actionable strategies and playbooks to help finance leaders rearchitect their operating model and orchestrate a successful reimagining of the finance function.

A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business | Adam Morgan & Mark Barden

An inspiring yet practical guide for transforming limitations into opportunities

The book takes the reader on a journey through the mindset, method and motivation required to move from the initial "victim" stage into the transformation stage. It challenges us to:

• Examine how we've become path dependent―stuck with routines that blind us from seeing opportunity along new paths

• Ask Propelling Questions to help us break free of those paths and put the most pressing and valuable constraints at the heart of our process

• Adopt a Can If mentality to answer these questions―focused on "how," not "if"

• Access the abundance to be found all around us to help transform constraints

• Activate the high-octane mix of emotions necessary to fuel the tenacity required for success

Good to Great | Jim Collins

Can a good company become a great one? If so, how?

After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising - at times even shocking - to the modern mind.

Good to Great achieves a rare distinction- a management book full of vital ideas that reads as well as a fast-paced novel. It is widely regarded as one of the most important business books ever written.

CFO of the Future: The trusted guide for CFOs to lead with IMPACT and create VALUE | Alena Bennett 

The Rate of Change for CFOs isn't Slowing Down

Over the last 20 years the remit of the CFO has transformed from that of a scorekeeper/cost controller to one of a value creator. Coupled with the continued volatility of the context organisations now operate in (think Global Financial Crisis (GFC), COVID-19 pandemic, technological advancements and ESG factors) the CFO now needs to wear more hats than ever.

It's time for CFOs to step into the spotlight!

Boards, Investors and CEOs are looking to their CFO for the guidance and strength to drive performance now and into the future. Whether you're juggling the spinning plates or ready to move from Business Partner to Playmaker, the 12 CFO skills Alena shares in this trusted guide will enable you to lead with significance and will allow you to walk away feeling confident in your current role and empowered to create your next.

Meaning Matters: Results Beyond the Numbers | Alena Bennett 

Women in finance often have a disconnect between their purpose and their number crunching hyper-analytical jobs. Yet women in finance want more than money and status! They want to deliver results beyond the numbers. 

This book covers exactly why prioritising discovering your purpose is the key to exceptional performance, unwavering confidence and continued career progress. In the first book specifically written for this audience, Alena shows you how to figure out where you want to go, the capabilities and principles you need, and how to bring it all to life.

In a male dominated field, discovering your purpose and integrating it into your work is essential to thrive. This practical guidebook for women in finance will help you find your purpose and execute it exactly where you're at.

The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation | Anh Nguyen Phillips & Gerald C. Kane 

Why an organisation's response to digital disruption should focus on people and processes and not necessarily on technology.

Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions—but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organisational dynamics and how work gets done. A focus only on selecting and implementing the right digital technologies is not likely to lead to success. The best way to respond to digital disruption is by changing the company culture to be more agile, risk tolerant, and experimental.

The Accidental CIO | Scott Millett

An indispensable guide showing IT leaders the way to balance the needs of innovation and exploration with exploitation and operational reliability

Many books on modern IT leadership focus solely on supporting innovation and disruption. In practice these must be balanced with the need to support waste reduction in existing processes and capabilities while keeping the foundation operational, secure, compliant with regulations, and cost effective.

In The Accidental CIO, veteran software developer-turned-executive Scott Millett delivers an essential playbook to becoming an impactful, strategic leader at any stage of your IT leadership journey from your earliest aspirations to long time incumbents in director and C-suite roles. You’ll find a wealth of hands-on advice for tackling the many challenges and paradoxes that face technology leaders, from creating an aligned IT strategy, defining a target architecture, designing a balanced operating model, and leading teams and executing strategy.

Autonomous Transformation: Creating a More Human Future in the Era of Artificial Intelligence | Brian Evergreen

From technologist and strategist Brian Evergreen, a bold new agenda for the role of organisational leaders in creating a more human future with technology

With a recent wave of technological advancements, organizations have arrived at another global redesign and rebuilding of the network of systems that make up society: Autonomous Transformation, revealing an opportunity for leaders to create Profitable Good through systemic design in combination with emerging autonomous technologies and surprising and remarkable partnerships.

Autonomous Transformation provides a blueprint for leaders and managers who have aspired or attempted to harness artificial intelligence and its adjacent technologies for the betterment of their organization and the world, weaving strategy, business, economics, systemic design, and philosophy into four actionable steps with accompanying frameworks:

• Clear the Digital Fog

• See the Systems

• Choose a Problem Future

• Design Inevitability

Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation | George Westerman, Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee

Leading Digital makes the provocative argument that the next imminent phase of digital technology adoption - driven by the convergence of mobility, analytics, social media, cloud computing, and embedded devices - will make everything that's happened so far look like a prelude.

The authors, a trio of highly regarded thought leaders on corporate digital transformation, say changes in the digital realm so far have focused on high tech and media companies - but there's still a whopping 94% of the business economy that needs to change. This book will show them how.  Case studies include Nike, Caesars, Burberry, Asian Paints, Pages Jaunes, and more.

Stone Heart, Light Heart: The Intelligence of Self Mastery | Stella Petrou Concha

Stone Heart, Light Heart is a transformative guide to unlocking inner strength and spiritual wisdom. Blending ancient universal laws with modern psychology, it shows readers how to master the mind, overcome fear and self-doubt, and embrace both resilience and love.

The concept revolves around two powerful forces within us:

Stone Heart – the warrior spirit that embodies strength, grit, and courage to face challenges without judgment or limitation.

Light Heart – the spiritual essence that radiates joy, love, and acceptance, bringing calm and clarity through mindfulness.

By harmonising these two aspects, readers discover purpose, passion, and the ability to manifest their dreams. This book offers practical insights on finding your true self, building mental toughness, forgiving, loving, and living authentically. Ultimately, Stone Heart, Light Heart empowers you to awaken your inner warrior while nurturing a heart full of light.

Brave | Sheila Vijeyarasa

Courageusly Live Your Truth

For high-achieving women who have spent years delivering results, Brave asks the question that rarely makes it onto a board agenda: are you living someone else's version of success?

Vijeyarasa offers a no-nonsense framework for cutting through the noise of corporate expectation to reconnect with what actually drives you. Less self-help fluff, more honest reckoning — with practical tools, real case studies, and the kind of clarity that comes from someone who has navigated that tension herself.

A sharp, grounding read for any executive woman ready to lead her own life with the same conviction she brings to the boardroom.

The Power of Little Steps | Sheila Vijeyarasa

Create the Life of Your Wildest Dreams

In a world that rewards speed and punishes imperfection, Vijeyarasa makes a quietly radical argument: the most meaningful progress is rarely dramatic. It's incremental, intentional, and grounded in purpose rather than perfection.

This resonated with me deeply. The qualities that have shaped my own career — persistence through complex transformation programmes that don't yield results overnight, patience when navigating ambiguity and organisational resistance, and resilience when setbacks reframe the path forward — are precisely what this book articulates so well. Vijeyarasa names what high-achieving women often feel but rarely say: that the relentless pursuit of perfection can quietly move us further from ourselves and from what we're actually here to do.

Her central insight is simple but powerful — purpose moves us forward; perfection freezes us. Taking the next small brave step, even when the destination isn't fully clear, is how lasting change actually happens.

For any woman navigating significant change — professionally or personally — this book is a grounding reminder that persistence and patience aren't the slow route. They're the right route.

I Am Enough: Mark Your Mirror And Change Your Life | Marisa Peer

Three words can change your Life

I Am Enough by Marisa Peer is a powerful guide to building unshakable self-worth and breaking free from self-sabotage. The book teaches that when you truly believe you are enough, every area of your life—career, relationships, and happiness—transforms. Through simple yet proven techniques, Marisa shows how repeating and internalizing the phrase “I am enough” can rewire your mindset, eliminate destructive thoughts, and create lasting confidence.

Drawing on her award-winning Rapid Transformational Therapy, Marisa shares practical tools to help readers overcome fear, self-doubt, and limiting beliefs. This inside-out approach fosters permanent change, enabling you to live a motivated, confident, and fulfilled life. Packed with actionable strategies, I Am Enough empowers you to embrace your worth and unlock success in every aspect of life.

The Obstacle is the Way | Ryan Holiday 

Drawn from the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way makes a deceptively simple argument: the thing standing between you and where you want to go is not the problem. It is the path.

It is the kind of idea that sounds philosophical until you have lived through a complex transformation programme, a structural financial challenge, or an organisational change that resists every push. Then it stops being philosophy and starts being a practical operating model.

Holiday organises the book around three disciplines — perception, action, and will. Of the three, perception is the one I return to most. How we frame a challenge shapes everything that follows. Organisations and leaders who see disruption as a threat to be managed tend to move slowly and defensively. Those who train themselves to see the same disruption as a signal — even an invitation — find optionality where others find paralysis. In my experience leading digital and financial transformation across complex organisations, the difference between programmes that deliver and those that stall often comes down to exactly this: whether the leadership team has the clarity and discipline to reframe the obstacle as the work itself, not as an interruption to it.

The discipline of will resonates just as strongly. Holiday is not writing about blind optimism or relentless positivity. He is writing about the quiet, grounded strength that allows you to absorb setbacks without being defined by them — to keep moving with patience and persistence even when momentum is hard to feel. For anyone navigating long-cycle change, that distinction matters enormously.

This is not a book about avoiding difficulty. It is a book about understanding that difficulty, met with the right mindset, is precisely what builds the capability, character, and credibility to lead at the highest level.

Compact, rigorous, and genuinely useful. One of the few business books I would read twice.

Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean | Kim Scott 

Radical Candor by Kim Scott redefines effective management by challenging the old advice to “say nothing if you can’t say something nice.” Drawing on her leadership experience at Google and Apple, Scott introduces a framework that balances caring personally with challenging directly—the sweet spot between aggressive and overly empathetic management. The book offers practical guidance on giving both praise and criticism to drive results and develop talent. With three core principles—make it personal, get things done, and understand why it matters—Radical Candor is an actionable guide for building strong relationships, fostering honest conversations, and creating workplaces where people love their work and strive for success. 

The Five Temptations of a CEO | Patrick Lencioni

Make your Next Conversation the one that Changes Everything

Most leadership books tell you what good looks like. Lencioni does something more useful — he names what gets in the way.

Written as a leadership fable, The Five Temptations of a CEO follows a struggling executive on a late-night train ride that becomes an unexpected masterclass in self-awareness. It is a short read that stays with you far longer than its page count suggests.

The five temptations Lencioni identifies — choosing status over results, popularity over accountability, certainty over clarity, harmony over productive conflict, and invulnerability over trust — are not abstract concepts. They are recognisable patterns I have witnessed, and at times wrestled with myself, across every organisation I have worked in.

The one that cuts deepest from my own experience is the temptation of harmony over productive conflict. In high-stakes transformation environments, the instinct to smooth over disagreement rather than lean into it is powerful — particularly when relationships, timelines, and budgets are all under pressure. Lencioni is right that what looks like harmony is often just deferred tension. The organisations that transform successfully are the ones where leaders are willing to have the hard conversations early, clearly, and with genuine intent to reach better decisions — not just comfortable ones.

The accountability temptation is equally sharp. Wanting to be liked is deeply human, but it is also quietly corrosive to performance. I have seen talented teams plateau not because they lacked capability, but because no one was willing to name the gap between where things were and where they needed to be.

What I appreciate most about this book is its honesty about the courage leadership actually requires. Not the polished, conference-keynote version of courage — but the everyday kind that shows up in difficult conversations, unpopular decisions, and the willingness to be wrong in front of people who are watching.

Essential reading for any executive serious about leading with integrity and delivering results that last.

The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More | Jefferson Fisher

Make your Next Conversation the one that Changes Everything

No matter who you're talking to, The Next Conversation gives you immediately actionable strategies and phrases that will forever change how you communicate. Trial lawyer and communications expert Jefferson Fisher has gained millions of followers online through short, simple, practical videos teaching people how to argue less and talk more. And now he offers a tried-and-true framework that will show you how to transform your life and your relationships by improving your next conversation.

Whether it's handling a heated conversation, dealing with a difficult personality, or standing your ground with confidence, his down-to-earth teachings have helped countless people navigate life's toughest situations.

Everything you want to say, and how you want to say it, can be found in The Next Conversation.