Some of My Favorite Books About Leadership and High Reliability

• The Heart of Leadership: 12 Practices of Courageous Leaders--Provides practices of courageous leaders, emphasizing competency, intimacy, integrity, and passion. Chock full of useful insights and practices.
• What Got You Here Won't Get You There--Gives you insight on how talents and habits that make you very successful as a junior officer/executive are not the abilities you need to be successful in senior leadership positions (one of my biggest struggles as a CO) and provides many practical suggestions for how to identify those habits and overcome them so you can be more successful. The author's father was a Navy chief so he provides free training for all new flag officers.
• Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity--A systematic description of the principles and practices of high reliability organizations that many naval officers grow up learning, but cannot explain very effectively. Absolutely essential for teaching others.
• The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work--How to use tools you need to build the intuitive skills to make tough choices, spot potential problems, manage uncertainty, size up situations quickly, communicate such decisions more effectively, and coach/get coached to build professional expertise.
• Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership (4^th edition)--Helps you be a more effective and visionary leader by teaching you the importance of stepping back and looking at organizational situations from four different perspectives (structural, human resource, political and symbolic), thus providing an antidote to the tendency to look at situations or problems from a limited narrow perspective and giving you a much more effective way to gather data and work problems.
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die--Since one of the main tasks of leadership is to communicate important ideas that have to persist so somebody in a critical situation a week or a month later can to remember what you said and take the right action based on it. This book explains with practical examples and techniques why some ideas stick with people better than others do.
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity--Our mind is for having ideas, not holding them. This book is about creating a system outside your head for collecting and defining your commitments so your brain does not have to maintain and manage the inventory.
• Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks over Northern Iraq --Draws on an extensive knowledge of systems theory and organizational behavior to paint a disconcerting picture of the potential pitfalls of organizational complacency that every military professional should take to heart.
• The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (2^nd edition)--Details the system of transformation, the system of profound knowledge, that underlies Deming's 14 Points for Management: appreciation for a system, knowledge about variation, theory of knowledge, and psychology.
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable--Despite our biases to the contrary, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable while we spend most of our time focusing on the known and the repeated, this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly the large deviations: Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more relevant than what you do know)
• The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything --I listened to the audio version's first CD and only stopped because it is a great explanation for why my leadership approach has been so effective for many years and I already know it.

As I wrote above, these are not the only books I recommend, but they are at the top of my list.  In a future (dare I write "next"?) post, I will provide a list of the Harvard Business Review articles that I think are particularly noteworthy.