5 Non-Traditional Books for CEOs To Put on Your Reading List for 2025
Your personal CEO library is probably stacked with the classics: Good to Great, Shoe Dog, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Innovators Dilemma, Unreasonable Hospitality, and — hopefully! — Making BIG Happen. You might even find yourself reaching once again for these books as you’re thinking about your annual planning for 2025 to help you clarify your goals and strategies for the year ahead.
The best books and authors are always worth revisiting. But business is evolving so rapidly now that your thinking as a CEO has to keep pace. As you’re preparing to Make BIG Happen, also make 2025 the year that you diversify your inputs more and broaden how you see your company, your industry, and the world.
Here are five books CEOs might not have on their reading lists that can shake up your leadership perspective.
1. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales
These stories of adventure, the wilderness, and survival teach profound lessons about leadership, mindset, and high-stakes decision-making.
Key Ideas:
- Regulate your emotions. Survivors manage fear and frustration without slipping into overconfidence. CEOs also need to keep a clear head when making high-pressure decisions.
- Be adaptable. When everything is on the line, locking yourself into rigid thinking often leads to disaster.
- Maintain situational awareness. Complacency and tunnel vision can be a death sentence — literally in survival situations, figuratively for CEOs who can’t see past their blind spots and assumptions.
“The world we imagine seems as real as the ones we’ve experienced. We suffuse the model with the emotional values of past realities. And in the thrall of that vision (call it ‘the plan,’ writ large), we go forth and take action. If things don’t go according to the plan, revising such a robust model may be difficult. In an environment that has high objective hazards, the longer it takes to dislodge the imagined world in favor of the real one, the greater the risk. In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too.”
2. The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
In five thought-provoking dialogues, a philosopher and young man unpack our need for external validation and encourage us to take more responsibility for our lives.
Key Ideas:
- Let go of the need for approval. As we often tell our CEO coaching clients, “Nice guy is not a job.” Leaders need to focus on their own principles and visions and execute them with empathy.
- Don’t control, contribute. CEOs should foster a diverse, inclusive workspace that promotes collaboration and personal engagement.
- Embrace detachment. Let go of things you can’t control — including what others think about you — and focus on managing the key drivers of your company’s success.
“Being praised essentially means that one is receiving judgment from another person as ‘good.’ And the measure of what is good or bad about that act is that person’s yardstick. If receiving praise is what one is after, one will have no choice but to adapt to that person’s yardstick and put the brakes on one’s own freedom.”
3. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp
The legendary choreographer draws upon her experiences at world-class ballet companies in this practical guide to using discipline and routine to foster creativity.
Key Ideas:
- Build your own routine. What works for one person might not work for you. Find that specific set of daily rituals that helps you move through your day while also giving you time to think outside box.
- Create a culture of innovation. Use your company’s meeting rhythms to balance freedom, feedback, and accountability.
- Break through blocks. Innovative companies draw inspiration from their leaders to find creative solutions to even the most complex problems.
“Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it—for ourselves and others.”
4. Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
This book is a great introduction to the concept of “systems thinking,” which CEOs can use to understand and manage both their companies and their larger business spaces.
Key Ideas:
- Understand complexity. Identify the interdependencies, pain points, feedback loops, challenges, and opportunities that connect every part of your business.
- Anticipate consequences. Game out your next BIG decision beyond its immediate impact so that you’re prepared for anything.
- See the BIG picture. Take a holistic view of challenges and you might see innovative solutions that transform your whole company.
“Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them to be plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption that may become entangled with your own identity.”
5. Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World by Carol S. Pearson
Pearson’s 12 archetypes, rooted in Jungian philosophy, exemplify universal patterns of thought and behavior. Understanding these archetypes can help CEOs develop self-awareness and reflect on not just what they do as leaders, but why and how they’re doing it.
Key Ideas:
- Lead with self-awareness. CEOs who know themselves can refine their leadership styles by leaning into strengths and shoring up weaknesses.
- Embrace change. Every hero’s journey involves destruction and creation, wandering and discovery, loss and growth. CEOs need to be prepared to lead through these inevitable stages.
- Have fun! A good sense of humor and full heart can keep morale and productivity running high.
“We find a model for learning how to live in stories about heroism. The heroic quest is about saying yes to yourself and, in so doing, becoming more fully alive and more effective in the world. For the hero’s journey is first about taking a journey to find the treasure of your true self, and then about returning home to give your gift to help transform the kingdom — and, in the process, your own life. The quest itself is replete with dangers and pitfalls, but it offers great rewards: the capacity to be successful in the world, knowledge of the mysteries of the human soul, the opportunity to find and express your unique gifts in the world, and to live in loving community with other people.”
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average EBITDA CAGR of 67.8% during their time as a client, nearly four times the U.S. average and a revenue CAGR of 25.5%, more than twice the U.S. average.
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