Here are 100 books that The Leader on the Couch fans have personally recommended if you like
The Leader on the Couch.
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I'm Carmen F. Vlasceanu, PhD, FIH, hospitality executive, mentor, and author who believes in leading with a good heart and living with purpose. Through my book Dare to C.A.R.E. and the life coaching I offer, I help people reconnect with their inner power, serve others authentically, and grow in every area of life. As a single mom, global citizen, and lifelong learner, I’ve walked through burnout, reinvention, and bold dreaming. These books have helped me rediscover my voice, redefine my mission, and remember what really matters. They helped ground me in faith, encouraged my evolution, and reminded me why meaningful connection always comes first.
This book helped me shift my mindset, and I first picked it up during a stressful phase of my life. I gave myself some time to simply breathe and take it in. It reminded me that the “now” is not just a passing second, but a sacred space where peace and clarity live.
I love how it helped me stop living in the echo of yesterday or the fear of tomorrow. I remember closing my eyes and whispering, “This moment is enough,” and feeling my shoulders relax for the first time in weeks. It helped me feel more connected with myself, my son, my clients, and in doing so, intentionally live every moment with more compassion, stillness, and supremacy.
**CHOSEN BY OPRAH AS ONE OF HER 'BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH'**
The international bestselling spiritual book, now with a new look for its 20th anniversary. Eckhart Tolle demonstrates how to live a healthier, happier, mindful life by living in the present moment.
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'I keep Eckhart's book at my bedside. I think it's essential spiritual teaching. It's one of the most valuable books I've ever read.' Oprah Winfrey
To make the journey into The Power of Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
My fascination with the intricate web of influence and its profound impact traces back to my immersion in literature. Through the immersive experience of reading, we embark on a journey into the minds of others, expanding our understanding and evolving our individual perspectives. My professional trajectory has been shaped by a relentless pursuit of understanding the dynamics of influence across people, processes, and technology. Coupled with experiences spanning all seven continents and interactions with tens of thousands of individuals, I've undergone a transformative journey. Yet, it's the collective success of individuals embracing their humanity, both independently and collaboratively within their spheres of influence, that fuels my passion for continual growth and improvement.
Leadership & Self-Deception is an essential lesson presented through a narrative about the triumphs and tribulations of a business leader. The story highlights a universal challenge—falling into a self-centered mindset, dubbed "being in the box" by the authors.
The book navigates through scenarios that confront readers' perceptions of personal relationships and problem-solving, often prompting uncomfortable introspection. However, its engaging narrative style effectively communicates enduring insights.
Within our organization, we recommend this book to all team members as a foundational resource for developing self-awareness, communication skills, and leadership abilities.
This third edition of an international bestseller--over 2 million copies sold worldwide and translated into 33 languages--details how its powerful insights on motivation, conflict, and collaboration can benefit organizations as well as individuals.
Since its original publication in 2000, Leadership and Self-Deception has become an international word-of-mouth phenomenon. Rather than tapering off, it sells more copies every year. The book's central insight--that the key to leadership lies not in what we do but in who we are--has proven to have powerful implications not only for organizational leadership but in readers' personal lives as well.
Leadership and Self-Deception uses an entertaining…
I’ve always been fascinated by how we can fulfill our potential in a way that allows us to thrive rather than burning ourselves out in the process. My motto is I’d like to ‘save the world, but be back in time for tea.’ My fascination has led me down all sorts of intriguing avenues. I’ve become a stand-up comic (and taken four solo shows to the Edinburgh Fringe), exploring how humor can help us tackle tough topics. I’ve researched mental health (I’m currently studying for an MSc in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health), I’ve studied elite sports, and I’ve been an Executive Coach to leaders of diverse organizations.
I’m not a fan of conflict (Who is?!), so I found this book incredibly helpful. I really liked the way the authors broke things down into simple buckets. For example, rather than thinking, ‘Why did that innocent little, tiny comment wind me up so much? I must be a muppet!’ It helped me to see the principles at play and, therefore, what I could do to keep thriving.
I use many of the techniques described here on a daily basis. They have helped me to stay true to what is important whilst maintaining rapport, to seek out valuable feedback without getting bent out of shape, and to deliver difficult messages more compassionately and effectively.
Keep your cool and get the results you want when faced with crucial conversations. This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever.
The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation-especially difficult ones-leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
At 29 I was one of the first female traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, building my own all-female trading company. I lost everything in 1987, which gave me a stellar opportunity to understand my power to choose how I responded to the turmoil. Now, I’m an internationally credentialed Master Certified Coach, Board Certified Coach, University of Chicago-trained psychotherapist, and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Over 25 years ago I founded my coaching company, Jody Michael Associates. We focus on building emotional intelligence, executive presence, and mental fitness. When we help our clients learn to lead lightly, they take themselves, their teams, and their organizations to new levels of awareness, discernment, and performance.
This classic has stood the test of time because it artfully intertwines psychology and business in a way few books do.
Dr. Abraham Maslow is known for his work on the hierarchy of human needs and self-actualization. I also like the fact that he had the experience – the street cred, if you will – as a factory worker, where he gained a very practical basis for his psychological theory and research.
This book offers great insight into what drives people at their core. It will make you a better observer of people and will give you greater capacity to understand yourself and others better.
A seminal work onhuman behavior in the workplace-now completely updated "At last! We have all been quoting Maslow for years and to now have such an excellent compilation of his seminal thoughts on management and organization comes like a timely gift from heaven. The values and principles he taught decades ago are even more relevant today." -Stephen Covey, author, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. "Maslow's book is a readable, impressionistic masterpiece that extolled the virtues of collaborative, synergistic management decades ahead of its time. This edition reveals just how much the management thinkers of our day, including Peter…
I have always had so-called “authority problems.” It wasn’t the people; it was the rigidity that got to me. But just as much or more, I have always loved things complex, unequivocal, strange, soulful, and poetic. I have loved stories. They helped me to eventually understand the leaders and either make friends with them or avoid them. They helped me to make peace with the rebellious streak in myself. I read about leaders, mangers, and employees, I research them, I write about them and for them. Stories enable me to express all these insights in a form that is, at the same time, truthful and resonant (I hope).
I love reading fiction, and so do many of my students. This book is a gift for us fiction lovers who are also interested in leadership.
From ancient to modern, literature teaches about quite contemporary issues regarding leadership. In fact, I was astounded to realize how much real-life insight fiction is able to offer in this respect–much more than many management textbooks that often present a simplified and rationalized image of what management means. This book teaches how to approach difficult and very human aspects of leadership: everything that is linked to human experience.
I found accounts of Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, Maurice Blanchot, and other writers captivating and enlightening.
Management theory is vague about the experience of leading. Success, power, achievement are discussed but less focus is given to negative experiences leaders faced such as loneliness or disappointment. This book addresses difficult-to-explore aspects of leadership through well-known works of literature drawing lessons from fictional leaders.
I have always had so-called “authority problems.” It wasn’t the people; it was the rigidity that got to me. But just as much or more, I have always loved things complex, unequivocal, strange, soulful, and poetic. I have loved stories. They helped me to eventually understand the leaders and either make friends with them or avoid them. They helped me to make peace with the rebellious streak in myself. I read about leaders, mangers, and employees, I research them, I write about them and for them. Stories enable me to express all these insights in a form that is, at the same time, truthful and resonant (I hope).
I loved this collection of stories about leadership; what a page-turner! I was thrilled by the depth and imaginativeness of possible connections between fairy tales, legends, and traditional stories and management learning. I loved how the tales of Prometheus, Dædalus and Icarus, Merlin, and others are interwoven with issues important for contemporary managers.
Stories of conceit and hubris, as well as of adventurous quests for integration are spun in a way that made me feel compassion for the plight of many employees as well as of leaders, but, at the same time, they spoke to my rebellious streak. With so many glorious tales to learn from, we deserve better leaders: inspired, spirited, humane, or at the very least–human.
Leadership and Wisdom: Narrating the Future Responsibly gives business students and practitioners the opportunity to re-read tales, poems, myths and fables that have been interpreted by leading management scholars in order to translate the world's folk wisdom into insightful and actionable lessons for a more responsible leadership practice.
Most, if not all, cultures generate narratives that teach people how to make sense of the world and how to respond to challenges with wisdom. These sources provide a medium for character, as well as a guide for decision-making in ambiguous and uncertain circumstances. Management and organization scholars increasingly focus on what…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I have always had so-called “authority problems.” It wasn’t the people; it was the rigidity that got to me. But just as much or more, I have always loved things complex, unequivocal, strange, soulful, and poetic. I have loved stories. They helped me to eventually understand the leaders and either make friends with them or avoid them. They helped me to make peace with the rebellious streak in myself. I read about leaders, mangers, and employees, I research them, I write about them and for them. Stories enable me to express all these insights in a form that is, at the same time, truthful and resonant (I hope).
In the corporate world out there, the managers are actual people: men and women enter the stage under quite unequal conditions. I loved how this book throws light on a game that is far from fair from the outset and the odds are stacked against the women who enter it.
This is a classic that ages well–time changes, waves of equal opportunity policies are introduced, but still, I felt the basic mechanism this book reveals stays very much the same. I was fascinated by this book’s striking depiction of how men and women are dealt dissimilar cards but expected to perform just as well–and to act as if their conditions were fair and only merit mattered.
“The best and brightest” is a myth and not an inspiring one.
In this landmark work on corporate power, especially as it relates to women, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the distinguished Harvard management thinker and consultant, shows how the careers and self-images of the managers, professionals, and executives, and also those of the secretaries, wives of managers, and women looking for a way up, are determined by the distribution of power and powerlessness within the corporation. This new edition of her award-winning book has a major new afterward in which the author reviews and analyzes how attitudes and practices within the corporate power structure have changed in the 1990s.
I have always had so-called “authority problems.” It wasn’t the people; it was the rigidity that got to me. But just as much or more, I have always loved things complex, unequivocal, strange, soulful, and poetic. I have loved stories. They helped me to eventually understand the leaders and either make friends with them or avoid them. They helped me to make peace with the rebellious streak in myself. I read about leaders, mangers, and employees, I research them, I write about them and for them. Stories enable me to express all these insights in a form that is, at the same time, truthful and resonant (I hope).
I loved how this book literally links the surface of modern organizations with the depths of the human art of storytelling. Stories have been reservoirs of knowledge since times immemorial. Even now, although superficially supplanted by rational procedures and even computer code, it is in the stories collected and told about organizations that the richness of meaning can be found, which can help to understand and change them for the better.
I enjoyed how this book presents ideas that are both profound and serious in a way that is exceptionally readable and, in a way, liberating. I thought: wow! What an eye-opener! The superficial reductionism of the contemporary organization is just a shell and within lies hidden so much wisdom. It germinates.
Myths, stories, and folklore are part of the fabric and life of all organizations, enabling us to understand, identify, and communicate the character of the organization - its ambitions, conflicts, and peculiarities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork of storytelling in five organizations, this book argues that stories open valuable windows into the emotional and symbolic lives of organizations. By collecting stoires in different organizations, by listening and comparing different accounts, by investigating how narratives are constructed around specific events, by examining which events in an organization's history generate stories and which ones fail to do so, researchers can gain access to…
I’m passionate about self-improvement so that I can be the best version of myself and enable others to be the best versions of themselves. This rings true not only in business, which is one arena that I participate in. These business books have helped me become more aware and a better business leader! I hope others can find the same value that I have by investing time reading these books!
This book prepared me for all of the situations I didn’t know I needed to prepare for (but definitely needed to) in my first leadership role. The conversational format makes the book easy and enjoyable to read, and the examples she provides are highly relevant.
I still use the practice of visualizing one possible solution in the palm of one hand (“on one hand”), and another seemingly contradictory solution in the other hand (“but on the other hand”), and physically moving my hands towards each other to help stimulate an idea for how to combine the two solutions into one great outcome.
“Finally. A well-written and engaging book that provides honest and practical guidance to unlock what's standing between you and your best self.” —MARY MCDOWELL, CEO, Mitel Networks
“COMPOSURE's stories are so compelling and illustrative of similar experiences I've had as a female executive or have heard all too often from others. THIS IS ESSENTIAL READING. You have the power in you, and Kate helps you tap into it.” —SALLY THORTON, CEO, Forshay
As boardrooms inch their way toward diversity, women and those in other underrepresented groups who break into executive, managerial and entrepreneurial ranks step into a spotlight that puts…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m on a mission to cultivate creativity at work! After starting my career in the performing arts, I made a pivot to corporate life over 20 years ago and haven’t looked back. What I’ve discovered is how essential creativity is in any workplace, and how its impact on organizational culture is underrated. Effective leaders prioritize connection, creativity, and make culture a strategic priority. After learning from hundreds of artists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, I wrote this book to highlight their stories—unpacking how they bring creativity to life in their work. My hope is readers leave with tools to spark more meaningful connection and creative work experiences.
Ever wonder how some of the world’s biggest company leaders think about culture? Curious how talent was developed at Adobe, Twitter, and WeWork?
Filled with successes and hard lessons learned, ReCulturing artfully summarizes how culture shows up across the workplace and what you can do to shape it. Through her in-the-trenches stories and helpful prompts, Melissa demystifies the process of connecting culture to your company’s North Star.
I found myself enthusiastically head-nodding throughout and will generously refer to her helpful frameworks as I partner with clients on culture initiatives.
Drive business sustainability, growth, and profits by taking a systematic approach to culture transformation
It's no secret that culture is the key to attracting and engaging top talent and seizing the competitive edge. But the vast majority of culture efforts fail as quickly as they started. Why? Because leaders are missing the big picture. They're creating and communicating values but failing to ensure the values are tied to the purpose and the strategy of the company while also being integrated into processes, operations, and behaviors.
In ReCulturing, Melissa Daimler solves this persistent problem by helping you develop a "systems" perspective…
