The books shaping today’s business thinking

Spend time with high-performing leaders and one trait comes up again and again: curiosity. Not surface-level interest, but a deep and constant appetite to learn, absorb and challenge assumptions. As Graham Ruddick puts it, “very, very curious people are constantly looking to learn and books are a great way to do that.”

That curiosity is not confined to traditional business theory. In fact, one of the most striking takeaways from the Business Leader Podcast discussion on the books shaping today’s leaders is how wide-ranging and unexpected the sources of insight can be.

Sarah Vizard highlights this with Is This Working? by Charlie Colenutt, a book that doesn’t offer step-by-step leadership advice, but instead captures the lived experiences of people across different professions. Its value lies in perspective. It reveals how people actually feel about their work: pride, frustration and a growing tension between meaningful tasks and administrative burden.

That insight matters. Across industries, employees increasingly report spending large portions of their time on low-value work. According to a 2025 Microsoft Work Trend Index, employees spend up to 57 per cent of their time on coordination tasks such as meetings and emails rather than focused work.

Vizard’s takeaway echoes this: the challenge is ensuring people “do the thing that they love… and they don’t end up spending all their time doing the boring paperwork.”

Crucially, the most useful ideas often come from outside familiar territory. As Josh Dornbrack notes, “sometimes the best inspiration is from an unexpected source”. Whether it’s a story from a call centre worker or an insight from sport, these moments can spark changes in how teams are structured, motivated or led.

If Vizard’s recommendation is about understanding people, Ruddick’s is about rethinking how organisations operate. The Geek Way by Andrew McAfee challenges decades of conventional management thinking, arguing that the success of modern technology giants is rooted not just in innovation, but in how they are built and run.

At its core is a shift away from hierarchy and intuition towards speed, data and collective intelligence. Traditional models often default to the “HIPPO” - the highest paid person’s opinion. But as the book argues, this approach leads to poor decisions. Instead, the most effective organisations create environments where ideas are tested, challenged and refined regardless of seniority.

There are powerful cautionary tales here too. The failure of Quibi, a heavily funded streaming platform, is traced back to a top-down culture where “the people at the bottom were saying, this isn’t going to work” but their feedback never surfaced. It is a reminder that access to capital and talent is not enough without the right structures to harness them.

The theme of empowering people runs through other recommendations. Netflix’s culture, for example, is built on trust, autonomy and high performance, with minimal rules and maximum accountability. It is an extreme model, but one that demonstrates what can happen when individuals are given ownership and expected to act on it.

Dornbrack’s own pick, 50 Ideas That Changed the World of Work, reinforces a different point: many of the concepts shaping modern business, from psychological safety to growth mindset, are not new, but their application is evolving. By breaking them down into practical frameworks, the book offers a way to translate theory into action.

Taken together, the reading habits of today’s leaders point to a broader shift. Success is less about finding a single breakthrough idea and more about continuously updating how you think, about people, decisions and the systems that connect them.