The best leadership biographies that will make you laugh and cry

Any book by Michael Lewis is fun and educational, but this one I couldn’t put down. In 2002, for the first time, the Nobel prize for economics did not go to an economist but to a psychologist—Daniel Kahneman—who had single-handedly (with his genius collaborator Amos Tversky) disrupted the economics profession and its core theories—much like Einstein had transformed our understanding of reality and Freud of ourselves—and created an entirely new field called behavioral economics.

This is the story of a remarkable partnership of two eminent scientists who brought about this revolution. Tversky and Kahneman had such a close relationship that even their wives became jealous. This book might make you laugh and cry. And you might learn much about cutting-edge economics and our chronic biases.

This is another book (or better, a trilogy) that made me laugh and cry. If you don’t believe me, just read Winston Churchill’s stirring love letters to his wife—he called her “Cat,” she called him “Pug”—in the first volume. They are a deeply moving and eloquent testimony to a devotion that continued unabated throughout Churchill’s life.

No wonder he was the only head of state awarded the Nobel Prize, not for peace, but for literature. And William Manchester writes so powerfully that he rivals Churchill’s prose. If you want to know what made Churchill tick and how he became one of the transcendent leaders of our time, read this book. 

Mohandas Gandhi—whom Churchill called “that little naked man,” who had little more than his loincloth and his staff, who loved to sit at his spinning wheel—would catalyze the independence of India from the British Empire and ultimately help bring down that empire—without a phone or the internet or social networks.

This book reads like a thriller. I got into Gandhi’s head and learned how he became a man who would lay down his life for his principles of non-violence and the dignity of human beings; how he cunningly used symbolic actions like the salt march to expose the injustice of the British Commonwealth; and how he rose to be Churchill’s chief rival on the world stage and become a transcendent leader of our time.

Albert Einstein transformed our understanding of reality. In 1905 alone, the annus mirabilis, he published four different papers that were going to shake up the foundation of physics. But who was the man behind the special and general theories of relativity? The man who, albeit a genius, could not find a job as a professor in Switzerland because he was Jewish? The man who wrote a contract that forbade his wife from being in the kitchen when he was there? The man who married his cousin?

If you want to find out Einstein’s life story and what made him who he was, read this delightful biography by Walter Isaacson (who also penned biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk).

It has become fashionable to bash Elon Musk as an inhuman, dictatorial control freak. But what is at the source of who the co-founder of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla, and currently the world’s richest man, is? Why does (almost) anything he touches turn to gold?

It all became clear to me when I read the shocking revelations of how he grew up under a dictatorial father, a suspected con-man who created an alternate reality for Elon and his siblings; how he had to spend summers in the South African Veld and beat up other kids so they wouldn’t beat him up and send him to the hospital to stitch his face back together; how he treated his collaborators and competitors, his wives and ex-wives. What is Musk’s secret sauce? Read this book and find out.