Here are 100 books that Mr. Happy fans have personally recommended if you like
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It is shocking how many leaders suffer from imposter syndrome, and how little practical advice is out there about how to help. Itās been my mission to identify not only precisely what leaders need to be able to do well, but also how can they learn these things in the most efficient and durable way. Leadersmithing sets out a practical path to mastery and provides the toolkit leaders will really need. After I wrote it, I took on some senior leadership roles of my own. Even before Covid I had stress-tested the wisdom of this book, and post-covid I am even more confident that this leadership book really helps.
Epictetus is the Stoic who inspired the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism is the intellectual origin of cognitive behavioral therapy and a way for leaders to train themselves to focus on the things they can change, rather than breaking their hearts over things over which they have no control. The Enchiridion has the virtue of being much shorter than Aureliusā Meditations, and contains pithy observations and advice like āit is not events that disturb people, it is their judgment concerning them,ā and ādonāt hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.ā Leaders need to be good at detachment, and Stoicism can provide valuable tools to help.
Although he was born into slavery and endured a permanent physical disability, Epictetus (ca. 50āca. 130 CE) maintained that all people are free to control their lives and live in harmony with nature. We will always be happy, he argued, if we learn to desire that things should be exactly as they are. After attaining his freedom, Epictetus spent his career teaching philosophy and advising a daily regimen of self-examination. His pupil ArrianĀ later collected and published the master's lecture notes; the Enchiridion, or Manual, is a distillation of Epictetus's teachings and an instructionĀ manual for a tranquil life. Fullā¦
In 1894, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky set out to ride her bicycle. Not to the market. Not around the block. Not across town. Annie was going to ride her bike all the way around the worldābecause two men bet no woman could do it. Ha!
This picture book, with watercolor illustrationsā¦
After receiving my doctorate in Social Anthropology at Oxford University, I worked in the Nixon Administration until I was fired for publishing a study, Work in America, that garnered front-page attention and accolades in the New York Times (and condemnation in Wall Street Journal editorials). Unemployed and with a family to support, I was rescued by the Aspen Institute, which hired me to direct a program on workplace issues. There, I met philosopher Mortimer Adler, the management guru Peter Drucker, and the father of leadership studies, Warren Bennis. They became my mentors, and through them, I received the education I didnāt get in seven years of formal higher education!
This bible of Realpolitik is another how-not-to-lead classic.
Although Big Mac believed he was offering sound advice to his generic āprince,ā his prescription was famously amoral and situational and offered to those who had only one interest: to gain and maintain power at all costs. Since those ends justify any means to their attainment, the prince is advised to use such tactics as flattery, lying, bullying, threatening, and āconfusing menās minds.ā Do anything that works.
The prince uses his subject to achieve his ends, not theirs. He is all about himself. Sound familiar?
Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power.Ā Ā Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince . . . a king . . . a president.Ā Ā When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic.Ā Ā In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion.Ā Ā Today, this smallā¦
I am the principal of Guttman Development Strategies (GDS), an organization development firm that works with senior executives and their teams in major corporations globally to build horizontal, high-performance teams, provide leadership coaching, and develop leadership skills. I am a speaker and author of three acclaimed management books and dozens of articles in business publications.
The insights in this groundbreaking book apply across the board, from social and family life to interacting and managing others in organizational life.
What factors are at play when people of high IQ flounder while those who are more modestly endowed succeed? Goleman argues that the difference is Emotional Intelligence, which, as he explains, comprises empathy, effective social skills/communication, self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation.
Iāve watched too many of the allegedly best and brightest, tough-minded executives flame out because they failed to rein in emotional impulse, read othersā feelings, or handle interpersonal relationships. The skills are learnable, and in todayās asymmetric, hybrid, matrixed organizations, they are essential for success.
The groundbreaking bestseller that redefines intelligence and success Does IQ define our destiny? Daniel Goleman argues that our view of human intelligence is far too narrow, and that our emotions play major role in thought, decision making and individual success. Self-awareness, impulse control, persistence, motivation, empathy and social deftness are all qualities that mark people who excel: whose relationships flourish, who are stars in the workplace. With new insights into the brain architecture underlying emotion and rationality, Goleman shows precisely how emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened in all of us.
Real Princesses Change the World
by
Carrie A. Pearson,
Real Princesses Change the World is an inspirational and diverse picture book that highlights 11 contemporary real-life princesses and four heirs apparent from around the world.
Have you heard of a STEM-aligned real-life princess who is an engineer and product developer? Or a princess who is a computer expert? Anā¦
It is shocking how many leaders suffer from imposter syndrome, and how little practical advice is out there about how to help. Itās been my mission to identify not only precisely what leaders need to be able to do well, but also how can they learn these things in the most efficient and durable way. Leadersmithing sets out a practical path to mastery and provides the toolkit leaders will really need. After I wrote it, I took on some senior leadership roles of my own. Even before Covid I had stress-tested the wisdom of this book, and post-covid I am even more confident that this leadership book really helps.
Kleinerās Core Group Theory was an aha moment for me, because it teaches senior leaders how to use their power well. The theory explains how top leaders act on their organisations like a magnet on iron filings: the slightest clue or cue they give ripples out, and is amplified and copied by everyone that follows them. This makes it crucial that leaders are careful about even the smallest behavioral choice they make: their priorities, who they pay attention to, the jokes they make ā all of these will be seen as role model behaviors and replicated by those trying to impress. There is no such thing as off-stage for a leader.
When corporate leaders announce, with seeming sincerity that they make their decisions on behalf of their shareholders, their words are taken at face value. But as recent news stories prove, this imperative is routinely violated.
In Who Really Matters Art Kleiner argues that the dissonance between a declared mission and actual operation can be seen in both large and small organistions. All organisations have one motive in common: everything they do - choosing which projects to back, who to promote, where to spend the money is affected by the perceived wants and needs of a core group of key people.ā¦
What would I do if I was the last person on Earth? I have wondered this since I was a child after watching apocalyptic movies; Damnation Alley, Night of the Comet, and of course the Romero Living Dead movies. Would I be able to make it? Could I not only survive but contend with whatever menaces there were to face be they aliens, monsters, the living dead, or the actual living. My imagination would run loose, putting myself in the shoes of the characters to see how Iād fare, what would I do differently. These little escapes grew and matured into my own stories.
Itās been a while since I have read this one but it has always been one of my favorites. An American pilot is stranded in post World War 2 Britain. In this reality, moments before defeat, Adolf Hitler released a biological weapon that decimated the population. A hemorrhagic virus that attacks certain blood types, those not killed initially are slowly dying and desperate for a cure that they think is in the main character's blood since he is unaffected. The action in this book is some of the best I have ever read as the āBlack Shirtsā chase our hero through the war-torn city.
'48 by international bestseller and Master of Horror, James Herbert, explores a horrifying alternative end to the Second World War.
In 1945, Hitler unleashed the Blood Death on Britain as his final act of vengeance.
Those who died at once were the lucky ones. The really unfortunate took years. The survivors - people like me, who had the blood group that kept us safe from the disease - were now targets for those who believed our blood could save them.
I survived for three years. I lived alone, spending my days avoiding the fascist Blackshirts who wanted my blood forā¦
Since 2011 I have taught a summer course at Freie UniversitƤt Berlin, and have grown fond of the city, including its admirable efforts to acknowledge and atone for its former status as the capital of the Nazi empire. Iāve seen pictures of Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King touring the city and interacting (cheerfully) with Reich officials, and a couple of years ago I made a point of retracing his steps to observe the vestiges (very little) of prewar Berlin. This compelled me to dig deeply into what motivated King to break bread with Nazis, and how the prime ministerās trip was viewed by Canadians and the world ā at the time, and since.
Fromm, too, was a journalist alarmed by the rise of Nazism and Germansā increasing embrace of hatred and falsehood. She differs from Halton and Shirer in that she was 1) born in Germany, and thus had a deeper perspective on Nazismās place in German history and culture, 2) a woman, and thus expected to report on āsocietyā and fashion stories, although her interests and abilities soon drew her to politics, and 3) Jewish, and therefore subjected to the daily indignities, threats, and violence that in 1938 led her to flee a land her family had inhabited for five centuries. Fromm seemed to know everybody, including Nazi bigwigs, and was continually astounded by the degrees to which foreign visitors fell for blatant Nazi propaganda. Mackenzie King should have been listening.
The diary, smuggled out of Nazi Germany, of a Jewish woman who wrote the social column for a major Berlin newspaper, and was able to observe the rise of the Nazis
When I was in my early 40ās I walked into the hospital room of a 99-year-old near-death relative who mistook me for my fatherās brother who had been killed on the beachhead in Normandy during World War II. I was always a history buff, but this moment changed my life. I directed my energies to military history, starting with memoirs and writing a column for Armchair General magazine when it was in circulation. Published official histories (American Iliad, Aachen, Old Hickory) followed that were reliant on well-expressed memoirs written by participants, so full circle Iāve come back to my passion for writing, and reading war memoirs.
Imagine being 20 years old, and a freshly minted lieutenant with just two weeks in the line. You are a forward observer for a 105mm artillery battalion. Your first duty position is atop a 314-meter-high hill at Mortain France. It is early August 1944 and Adolf Hitler sends four panzer divisions to Mortain to stop the Allied breakout from Normandy. First they must take that hill.
Weissās stunning book details how he and 700 other men held Hill 314 for five long days. Chronicled more recently by an Aurora Award-winning documentary on PBS it is one of those World War II personal memoirs one never forgets.
When the Germans launched their biggest counter-attack in France during WWII, the elite troops of the 2nd SS Panzer Division surrounded a battalion of less than 700 US infantry on top of a key hill near Mortain in Normandy. The American "Lost Battalion", equipped with very little food, medical supplies, ammunition, or anti-tank weapons, held out for sixty days. At the end of the battle, 277 of the riflemen were dead, wounded, or missing. Author Robert Weiss experienced those harrowing days of the war, directing much of the fire as a field artillery forward observer on the hill. As theā¦
I am Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton, UK, and publish widely on diverse aspects of Nazi Germany. The first history book that I ever read was Alan Bullockās Hitler. A Study in Tyranny - the first scholarly biography of Hitler to appear. I still recall the fascination of reading this as a teenager: it sparked a curiosity that formed the basis of a scholarly career that has spanned nearly three decades.Ā The desire to make sense of the phenomenon of Nazism was never purely academic, however ā my own family origins in Germany, and the stories elderly relatives told of their wartime experiences, gave the history texture, immediacy, and urgency.
This was not the first biography of Hitler, but it was the first to try to explain Hitlerās power in terms of his relationship with the German people.Ā For Fest, Hitlerās power rested on his ability to channel ordinary Germansā hopes, fears, aspirations, and resentments.Ā Fest came from a solidly anti-Nazi bourgeois background and in his insistence on reading Hitler as an expression of populist resentments āfrom belowā we may detect an inability to countenance the idea that Nazism came just as much from the centre of educated German middle-class society. In that sense, the book is a fascinating insight into what was at stake in the postwar period when Germans argued over who or what had been to blame for the catastrophe of Nazism. It remains, however, a classic among earlier accounts of Hitlerās career.
I am Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton, UK, and publish widely on diverse aspects of Nazi Germany. The first history book that I ever read was Alan Bullockās Hitler. A Study in Tyranny - the first scholarly biography of Hitler to appear. I still recall the fascination of reading this as a teenager: it sparked a curiosity that formed the basis of a scholarly career that has spanned nearly three decades.Ā The desire to make sense of the phenomenon of Nazism was never purely academic, however ā my own family origins in Germany, and the stories elderly relatives told of their wartime experiences, gave the history texture, immediacy, and urgency.
This fascinating book takes the seemingly banal topic of Hitlerās domestic interiors as a way into exploring both how Hitler chose to project himself and how others ā from foreign diplomats to ordinary Germans ā learned to see him.Ā From his initial humble quarters in Munich to his conservatively furnished apartments in Berlin and his mountain retreat in the Alps, the evolution of Hitlerās interior design ethos reflected his move from ordinary front soldier to European statesman. The reproduction of his furnishing choices in glossy consumer magazines, meanwhile, offered aspirational Germans a chance to remake their own homes in emulation of their idol. If this sounds familiar, well, that may be the point.
A revelatory look at the residences of Adolf Hitler, illuminating their powerful role in constructing and promoting the dictator's private persona both within Germany and abroad
Adolf Hitler's makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator's preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler's bachelor life stirred rumors, and the Nazi regime relied on the dictator's three dwellings-the Old Chancellery in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof, his mountain home onā¦
An engaging picture book for children that celebrates what it means to be American!
What does it mean to be American? Does it mean you like apple pie or fireworks? Not exactly. This patriotic picture book is perfect for Memorial Day, Independence Day, Election Day, or any day you wantā¦
Because I have devoted my life to the study of two major topics: sexuality and radical politics like Nazism, and trying to understand the connection to both, it is both a fascinating and a taboo subject. In the past, the saying went: gentlemen simply did not discuss such subjects. As a historian and sociology for the past fifty-plus years, but also as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I have had a lifelong interest in Nazism and the mind of Nazisāboth men and women. Usually most histories of the Holocaust or Shoah avoid the sex lives of Nazis and their victims.
This is arguably the greatest book on the mind of Hitler. Written by a psychoanalyst, it was a secret psychological report that came out during World War II in 1943 expressly for āWild Billā Donovan, director of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA.Ā
Though quite common today in understanding people like Putin, Kim Jung Un, and other pathological world leaders, this was the first book to apply psychoanalytic insight to warfare. It described not only Hitlerās sexual deviance and obsessions but also correctly predicted his eventual suicide. There are many other books in this genre that followed Langerās book: Robert G.L. Waite, The Psychopathic God-- Adolf Hitler; Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Mind of Adolf Hitler, introduction to Hitlerās Table Talk 1941-1944; and Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler.
Rosenbaum is an excellent and readable introduction to this fieldāthe sexological explanation of the mind of Adolf Hitler and hisā¦
