Our definitive summer reading list

As summer rolls in at last, it’s the perfect time to dive into some compelling reads that can transform the way you think about teamwork and performance. Whether you’re lounging by the pool or taking a break from your hectic schedule, these books will provide invaluable insights into building and leading high-performing teams. Drawing inspiration from the world of sports, where teamwork and peak performance are paramount, this curated list will inspire you with stories of grit, resilience, and excellence.

From the locker rooms of championship-winning teams to the strategies of legendary coaches, each book offers unique lessons that can be applied to any team, in any field. So grab a cold drink, find a comfortable spot, and get ready to be motivated by tales of triumph, teamwork, and tenacity. This summer, let’s learn from the best in sports and apply those principles to our own high-performing teams.

1. “Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict” by Karin Hurt and David Dye

An essential resource for employees and managers looking to navigate frequent workplace conflicts, rebuild trust, enhance collaboration, and ultimately enjoy greater influence at work.

In today’s fast-evolving work environment, mastering workplace conflict with confidence and ease is crucial for achieving better results, reducing drama, and thriving at work.

Workplace conflict is becoming increasingly prevalent, exacerbated by the shift to remote work and hybrid teams, which has left many yearning for deeper human connections. Add to this a younger generation eager for more feedback and rapid change, the constant advancement of technology posing a threat to job security, and individuals reassessing their priorities and quietly quitting. Increased anxiety, stress, and depression, coupled with a loss of human relationships, have resulted in less tolerance and understanding, leading to unresolved conflicts.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• Practical Phrases to Deescalate Conflict: Over 300 actionable phrases to help deescalate common workplace conflicts, build trust, and facilitate better decision-making along with real-world examples and clear explanations of how specific phrasing can improve interactions.
• Critical Communication Tools: Essential tools to address workplace issues before they escalate, ensuring they are managed effectively and insights into maintaining open lines of communication to prevent conflicts from festering.
• Real-World Cases and Inspiring Stories: Findings from the World Workplace Conflict and Collaboration Survey, featuring responses from over 5,000 people across more than 45 countries. Inspiring stories and case studies that illustrate successful conflict resolution and collaboration.

By applying these strategies, employees and managers can navigate workplace conflicts with greater confidence and ease, fostering a more collaborative and productive work environment.

2. “Startup CEO Succession: A Founder’s Guide to Leadership Transition” – Evgeny Shadchnev

I had Evgeny Shadchnev, Executive Coach and Founder & ex-CEO of Makers Academy back on Mind Your F**king Business a few weeks ago to talk about that all-important decision: Do you stay on as founder CEO, or do you go and what happens next? This book every founder needs to read this book.

There are thousands of books about starting a business, but little guidance exists for founders and their boards on how to orchestrate a CEO succession when their VC-backed startup reaches an inflection point. In his definitive guide, Evgeny Shadchnev draws from his firsthand experience of handing over the reins at Makers, a leading coding bootcamp he co-founded, as well as from coaching dozens of startup CEOs.

Evgeny takes founders through the intricate personal and psychological landscape of CEO succession. He delves into reflecting on your deepest motivations for starting the company, assessing your skills and situation, choosing a successor, and executing a smooth handoff. His guidance helps startup leaders navigate this critical juncture with clarity and poise.

With candid insights and a structured framework honed over years of coaching, Evgeny Shadchnev equips founders to overcome this process’s fears, doubts, and anxieties. He charts a path for entrepreneurs to thoughtfully cede the CEO role and move forward to their next impactful phase, ensuring their values, relationships, and well-being remain intact.

Get Startup CEO Succession: A Founder’s Guide to Leadership Transition on Amazon

3. “High Performance Habits” – Brendon Burchard

These habits can make anyone extraordinary. They help you develop skills faster, dramatically increase your confidence, and achieve success in your life. Burchard’s research shows that just six deliberate habits give you the edge. Anyone can practice these habits, and when they do, extraordinary things happen in their lives, relationships, and careers.

Whether you want to get more done, lead others better, develop skills, or increase your sense of joy and confidence, the habits in this book will help you achieve it. Each of the six habits is illustrated by powerful vignettes, cutting-edge science, thought-provoking exercises, and real-world daily practices you can implement right now. Burchard’s insights are not just for athletes or CEOs—they’re for anyone looking to elevate their game.

Key Takeaways from the Book:

• Seek Clarity: High performers know what they want and are clear about their goals. This clarity drives their decisions and actions, helping them stay focused and motivated.
• Raise Necessity: Successful people don’t just set goals; they feel a deep necessity to achieve them. This sense of urgency and importance pushes them to perform at their best.
• Increase Productivity: It’s not just about working harder; it’s about working smarter. High performers are highly productive because they master their time and focus on high-impact activities.

Get High Performance Habits on Amazon

4. “The Authority Gap” – Mary Ann Sieghart

Imagine living in a world where your views are routinely patronized, your expertise frequently challenged, and people always address your companion before you—now imagine the reverse is true. This book provides a startling perspective on the unseen bias that still exists in our everyday lives. “The Authority Gap” exposes unconscious bias in a fresh take on how to address and counteract systemic sexism, providing actionable insights and strategies to create a more equitable world.

Here are three key takeaways from the book:

• Unseen Bias and Its Impact: The Authority Gap reveals the pervasive nature of unconscious bias that still affects women today. For example, US Supreme Court female justices are interrupted four times more often than their male counterparts—96% of the time by men. Understanding these biases is the first step toward addressing them.
• Cultural and Systemic Influences: The book highlights how cultural and systemic sexism manifests, such as British parents estimating their son’s IQ at 115 and their daughter’s at 107. By acknowledging these disparities, we can begin to challenge and change the cultural norms that perpetuate them.
• Empowering Stories and Data: Through interviews with pioneering women like Baroness Hale, Mary Beard, and Bernadine Evaristo, along with a wealth of data, Sieghart provides a comprehensive look at the issue. These stories and statistics not only highlight the problem but also offer ways to counteract systemic sexism, benefiting everyone.

Get it here

5. “Begin with We” – Kyle McDowell

If you’ve ever felt apathetic, disengaged, insecure, or afraid at work, Kyle McDowell’s insights can help transform your experience. As a former Fortune 10 senior executive turned author and inspirational speaker, McDowell has identified the root causes of dysfunction in business and provides a powerful remedy with his framework, The 10 WEs.

Here are three key takeaways from the book:

• Shift from Me to We: McDowell examines the plague of a “me-oriented” paradigm in business and highlights how shifting to a “WE-oriented” mindset can cure corporate dysfunction. This shift fosters a sense of unity and collaboration, essential for building high-performing teams.
• Cultivate Courageous Leaders: The book emphasises the importance of developing leaders who recognise that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. McDowell’s inside-out approach helps cultivate courageous, authentic leaders who are committed to the collective success of their teams.
• Framework for Excellence: The 10 WEs provide a structured framework for creating a Culture of Excellence. These guiding principles have reignited lost passion for leaders and have been adopted by thousands to create more impactful and fulfilling workplaces.

Transform apathy into optimism and fear into fulfilment with this real-world guide for creating authentic leaders and higher-performing teams. By adopting McDowell’s principles, you can build a workplace culture that inspires excellence and drives success.

Get Begin With We on Amazon

6. The Friction Project – Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao

Every organisation suffers from destructive friction. Ironically, some friction can be incredibly beneficial. Leaders aiming to boost workplace efficiency often end up making matters worse. Enter “The Friction Project” by bestselling authors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao. This book is a masterclass in becoming a “friction fixer.”

Sutton and Rao start by showing how expert friction fixers operate as trustees of their team’s time. They introduce friction forensics to help you pinpoint and resolve bad friction while preserving the good. Their help pyramid guides you through tackling friction issues, from reframing unfixable problems to feel less daunting to designing and refining organizational structures.

The core of the book dives into the root causes and solutions for the most damaging friction problems: oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast and frenzied teams. Sound familiar? Sutton and Rao offer practical advice to address these challenges.

They conclude with invaluable lessons for leading your own friction project. Learn to link small actions to big outcomes, harness the power of civility and care in your designs and repairs, and embrace the inevitable mess while striving to clean it up.

Ready to cut the crap and streamline your business? This book is your roadmap. Get it here

7. The Captain Class – Sam Walker

“The single most important ingredient after you get the talent is internal leadership. It’s not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself.”

Sam Walker’s “The Captain Class” uncovers a startling truth about the world’s most dominant sports teams: their success hinged on a unique type of captain—a leader with an unconventional mix of skills and tendencies.

Walker’s research, based on original interviews with athletes, general managers, coaches, and team-building experts, distills leadership into seven core qualities that define the Captain Class. These qualities range from extreme doggedness and emotional control to tactical aggression and the courage to stand apart. Through gripping accounts of high-pressure moments in sports history, “The Captain Class” will challenge everything you thought you knew about inspired leadership.

Get ready to rethink your assumptions about what it takes to lead. It’s not about being the loudest or the most charismatic. It’s about having the guts to lead in ways that others can’t or won’t.

Find it here

8. The Formula – Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg

Now, let’s talk about the fastest-growing sport on the planet: Formula 1. The meteoric rise of F1 is a thrilling saga that goes beyond what you see in “Drive to Survive.” In “The Formula,” Wall Street Journal reporters Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg deliver the first definitive account of how F1 captivated a global audience.

This book takes you deep inside the high-octane world of F1, where racing obsessives, glamorous settings, petrolheads, engineering geniuses, dashing racers, and bitter rivalries create a spectacle like no other. The story of F1’s world dominance is one of relentless transformation and bold experimentation. Winning championships requires a series of technical moon shots—and the ability to repeat those feats year after year.

From the sleek cars and massive budgets to the stunning locales from Monaco to Melbourne, “The Formula” covers it all. Starting in the 1950s Britain, where wartime engineering set the stage for a new era of motor racing, to iconic partnerships like Senna and Ecclestone, and controversial moments like Spygate and Crashgate, this book maps the journey of F1’s transformation into an entertainment powerhouse.

With unparalleled access to F1’s most legendary teams and personalities—from Ferrari to Lewis Hamilton, Christian Horner to Daniel Ricciardo—”The Formula” paints a vivid picture of the drivers, corporations, cars, rivalries, and audacious gambles that have defined the sport for over half a century.

This is a high-octane history of how modern F1 came to be, the first book to tell the story of the outrageous successes and spectacular crashes that have brought F1 to its current, extraordinary moment. More than just a sports story, it’s the tale of a commercial empire. An empire built in the 20th century, nearly rendered obsolete in the early 21st, but now resurgent and dominant. F1 is a disruptor that secured its place in the crowded sports marketplace through sheer cash, personality, and a fresh understanding of what a sport needs to thrive in the age of wall-to-wall entertainment.

Lights out and away we go

9. The Bonfire Moment

Here’s the hard truth: building teams is harder than building tech. That’s the insight from the pioneers of Google’s Startup Accelerator, Martin Gonzalez and Josh Yellin, who’ve identified a proven way to develop strong, resilient, and effective teams.

Most startups don’t fail because of bad products, poor timing, or cash mismanagement—they fail because of people problems. Conflicts over strategy, decision-making, and team culture are the real killers. Even the smartest entrepreneurs get tripped up by these soft issues. How do you fire a loyal friend who’s not cutting it? How do you keep your team motivated? What do you do when egos and emotions take over? The soft stuff can be brutally hard.

Gonzalez and Yellin lay out the common traps startup teams fall into and introduce their powerful one-day workshop: The Bonfire Moment. This unique process brings colleagues together for a full day of confronting hard truths, uncovering hidden dynamics, and gearing up for the intense challenges of startup life. When the constant hustle becomes overwhelming, a team’s Bonfire Moment pulls them out of the daily grind to reflect and reboot.

The Bonfire Moment has proven effective for hundreds of teams around the world—from small startups to large organizations—significantly improving their cohesion, focus, and effectiveness. Now, this book will teach leaders the principles behind The Bonfire Moment and how to run the workshop themselves. If you need to build an extraordinary team to achieve big goals, this is your playbook.

Key Takeaways:

• People Problems Are the Real Challenge: Most startups fail due to conflicts over strategy, decision-making, and team culture, not because of product issues or cash flow problems.
• The Bonfire Moment: A one-day workshop designed to help teams face hard truths, recognize hidden dynamics, and prepare for the challenges of startup life.
• Proven Effectiveness: The Bonfire Moment has significantly improved team cohesion, focus, and effectiveness for startups and large organizations alike, offering a practical solution for building strong teams.

Get it here

10. Escaping the Growth Curse

Sustainable growth requires a strategic form of governance where the board plays an active role on behalf of all stakeholders. This book guides companies through building their board, defining long-term strategy, and making necessary adjustments to serve continued growth.

This book offers a strategic blueprint for avoiding the traps that cause growth to stall. Sustainable company growth isn’t just a pipedream.

Here’s a glimpse into what you’ll learn:

• Identifying Growth Traps: The book’s first part shows companies how to recognise the traditional traps that hinder growth. Understanding these pitfalls is crucial for any company looking to sustain its momentum.
• Building Effective Governance: The second part provides a blueprint for building a robust board, defining long-term strategy, and making necessary adjustments to serve continued growth. This is about creating a governance structure that actively supports the company’s ambitions.
• Collaborative Strategic Renewal: The final part delves into how the board and executives must collaborate on strategic renewal. It’s about reimagining the limits of growth and ensuring that the company’s leadership works in harmony to steer the organisation toward sustained success.

Get Escaping the Growth Curse: The Path to Stronger Corporate Strategy on Amazon

11. Legacy – James Kerr

My team will tell you this is one of my favourite books. James Kerr’s “Legacy” dives into the heart of the world’s most successful sports team, New Zealand’s All Blacks, and unearths 15 powerful and practical lessons for leadership and business.

The essence of being a champion goes beyond just playing the game. Champions do extra—they sweep the sheds, they follow the spearhead, they keep a blue head, and they aim to be good ancestors. These aren’t just catchy phrases; they are the bedrock principles that have driven the All Blacks to sustained success.

Kerr’s “Legacy” is an inspiring handbook for leaders in every field. It addresses the secrets of sustained success, exploring how to achieve world-class standards consistently, handle immense pressure, train to win at the highest level, and consider the legacy you leave behind.

Key Takeaways:

• Champions Do Extra: Success is built on going the extra mile—doing the unseen, uncelebrated work that makes all the difference.
• Sustained Excellence: Consistently achieving world-class standards requires discipline, a strong team culture, and an unwavering commitment to improvement.
• Legacy and Impact: True leaders focus not just on their achievements but on the legacy they leave behind, shaping the future for those who follow.

Get it here

12. 76 Harley Street: The new approach to maximising your health and performance – Dr Jack Kreindler, Hiten Patel and Professor Greg Whyte

London’s Harley Street is synonymous with medical excellence, and this book brings that expertise to everyone. It draws on pioneering work carried out at 76 Harley Street, a top health clinic providing the best healthcare to athletes, industry leaders, and celebrities.

Here are three key takeaways from the book:

• Holistic Health Assessment: The book emphasises a 360-degree approach to health, combining modern medicine with the latest sports science. It starts by looking at your genes, lifestyle, and environment, ensuring that all body systems are functioning at maximum efficiency. This holistic assessment helps readers understand their unique health profiles and needs.
• Personalised Health Plans: After a thorough assessment, the book guides you in creating a personalised health plan. Whether you want to deal with a specific health issue, minimise disease risks and the effects of ageing, optimise cognitive capabilities, lose weight, prepare for an operation, or train for a marathon, the book provides the tools and motivation to achieve your goals.
• Inspiring Success Stories: The authors share inspiring stories of how they helped patients and celebrity clients overcome health challenges and fitness issues to achieve goals they never thought possible. These real-world examples illustrate the effectiveness of the clinic’s approach and offer motivation to readers.

Get 76 Harley Street: The new approach to maximising your health and performance on Amazon