Taking Lead: Must Read Books on Management and Leadership

Not everyone is born a leader. What does it mean to be a great leader who is ready to take charge and inspire the team (or a company) with integrity, authority, and enthusiasm? One can be an excellent employee, but not all successful employees become great leaders. Most leaders take responsibility for training themselves to be effective. Whether one chooses to learn from the wisdom of others or get insights from personal experience, becoming a successful mid-level manager or a visionary leader takes both hard work and a vision for the future.

The management space is replete with books filled with advice on leadership, but finding one that is engaging, insightful and practical can be tricky. Here we bring to you five inspiring books that are must-reads for all aspiring managers and leaders.

Management Lessons from the Masters: Believe To Succeed Like Azim Premji by Rajiv Agarwal

To decode success, one must borrow a leaf from an accomplished life. In this book, author Rajiv
Agarwal, also a management professor and family business consultant shows the strategies used by the czar of the Indian IT industry, Azim Premji, to chart his route for success.
In the fourth book in the ‘Management Lessons from the Masters’ series, Agarwal analyses various moves and decisions made by Premji before he became the face of corporate philanthropy. He shares insights into the vision and principles of a man who started his entrepreneurial journey with a small vegetable oil company at the young age of 21 and went on to build Wipro, one of India’s leading IT organizations.

How Anil Naik Built L&T’s Remarkable Growth Trajectory by R Gopalakrishnan and Pallavi Mody

How is a ‘Shaper’ different from a manager and a business leader? A Shaper operates with a long-term vision and successfully changes the trajectory of the company to make it future-ready, in the way Anil Naik shaped the future of Larsen & Toubro (L&T).

The narrative traces the spectacular five-decade-long journey of Anil Naik as a junior engineer from the shop floor to the position of MD, CEO and chairman. The story traverses through the parallel life journeys of L&T and Naik and witnesses their trials and tribulations.
Naik built the growth trajectory of L&T on the foundation of ‘value creation’ and transformed the company into an agile and competitive business conglomerate. Based on a series of personal interviews with Naik and his team, the book explores Naik’s mindset and actions that transformed L&T into a leading Indian MNC with a global footprint in fields as diverse as defence, nuclear power and aerospace to financial services, IT and engineering services.

How Anil Naik Built L&T’s Remarkable Growth Trajectory is the second book in the series, Shapers of Business Institutions. The book reveals ‘The Naik Way’—new theories of leadership and management as a catalyst to growth.

Team Management by Alan Clifton

The future of human civilization depends on teamwork. Be it nation-building, the making of a winning sports team or exploring the universe, teams are crucial to individual and collective success. The bestselling author of Master Strategist, Alan Clifton, also an experienced management professional, is back with a book that demystifies team management. Packed with case studies and insights, the book helps you understand teams from a scientific as well as behavioural perspective. The book delves into critical factors that define team management, including the fundamentals, team formations, leadership, and ways to measure team performance.

Doodles on Leadership Experiences Within and Beyond Tata by R. Gopalakrishnan

Doodles on Leadership is based on the metaphor of ‘balconies of leadership’. As a leader climbs
upwards in his or her career, the perspective changes from the transactional to the corporate and, further on, to a societal view. Moving away from the cut and thrust of operational action, this book reflects on a leader’s journey through the changing perspectives that come with each stage. It demonstrates how a leader’s mind engages progressively with broader matters, rather than staying confined to only those of his company and its operations.

The author argues that this widening engagement with society at large is most satisfying for business leaders, and emphasizes the role that business leaders can play in matters concerning nation and society. It demonstrates the practical way business leaders can contribute to the world, each based on his or her domain of expertise.

The Age of the Imperfect Leader: A Book That Demystifies the Complexities of Leadership Success! by Pawan Varma

With a down-to-earth approach, leadership expert and practitioner Pawan Verma goes beyond the rhetoric associated with leadership and makes the unequivocal suggestion that you should have the courage to be imperfect and if you try to be good at everything, you’d never be great at anything.

How’s that for a change?

In a powerful narrative enriched with examples from great leaders, The Age of the Imperfect Leader debunks the myth of perfect leaders. The book identifies the key secrets of leadership success in the modern world: discovering your strengths and investing in these areas, focusing on the strengths of your team members instead of their weaknesses, making your leadership team well-rounded, being a principled pragmatist and creating the eco-system needed for success in the contemporary world.

Click on book titles to go to their Amazon pages.