Good to Great – Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
by Jim Collins. Thoroughly research and filled with accessible summaries, this book provides some counter-intuitive revelations for leaders and corporate strategists.

Built to Last
by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Another well-research effort by these Stanford Business Professors, this book lays out the case that vision and values count, and provides a roadmap for visioning and planning in any organization.

Execution – the discipline of getting things done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
Bossidy, a most admired CEO through his career at Allied Signal and G.E., teams up with management guru Charan to describe in detail how the conversations in the organization – architected through intentional processed – surface issue and drive execution. This is required reading for any CEO and COO.

Scaling Up Excellence, by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao
These Stanford Business School professors penetrate the question of how to scale faster and further, without becoming bureaucratic, slow, and inefficient.

The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni
He distinguished a functionally smart and efficient organization from a healthy and adaptive one. The four key leadership key: (a) Create Clarity (results + culture), (b) Align at the Top, (c) Communicate it relentlessly, (d) Reinforce it with systems and incentives… but not too much structure.

The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman
If I had written a book, this would be it! This presents a paradigm and practices for sustainable success for yourself, your team, and your organization. It includes the “doings” of the needed behaviors, and also the “being” of how you and your teams are showing up. Right actions are needed (content), but even more important is where you are coming from (context).

Dare to Serve – How to drive superior results by serving others, by Cheryl Bachelder
This book by the CEO who achieved a dramatic turnaround of Popeye’s Kitchen details the journey and practices of Servant Leadership in Action. It is a playbook for the servant leadership approach.