Top 10 Books Every CEO Should Read

The list

1. Good to Great — Jim Collins. Greatness is built through unglamorous, disciplined consistency over years, not a single bold strategic bet.
2. High Output Management — Andrew S. Grove. Management is a genuine, learnable discipline with measurable leverage — treating it rigorously, rather than as an intuitive soft skill, produces dramatically better results.
3. The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz. Most leadership advice assumes things are going reasonably well; the moments that actually define a leader are the ones without a formula, and this book is one of the few honest accounts of navigating them.
4. Principles — Ray Dalio. Systematically capturing your own decision-making principles, and radically confronting mistakes and disagreements rather than avoiding them, compounds into meaningfully better decisions over a career.
5. Measure What Matters — John Doerr. Clear, public, regularly reviewed goals — Objectives paired with measurable Key Results — produce dramatically better execution than vague intentions checked occasionally, at any team size worth coordinating.
6. Extreme Ownership — Jocko Willink & Leif Babin. Genuinely owning every outcome, without exception or excuse, is what earns a leader the credibility and trust needed to lead well.
7. The Effective Executive — Peter F. Drucker. Effectiveness — doing the right things, not just doing things efficiently — is a learnable discipline, and most executives never deliberately develop it.
8. Radical Candor — Kim Scott. The kindest thing a manager can do is give clear, direct feedback — avoiding it to spare short-term discomfort causes far more damage over time.
9. Scaling Up — Verne Harnish. Scaling isn't one problem — it's four separate disciplines (people, strategy, execution, cash) that all need deliberate systems, not just more hustle.
10. Who Not How — Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Asking 'who could do this' instead of 'how do I do this' is a simple reframe with outsized impact — it turns delegation into the default first move rather than something you reluctantly resort to once overwhelmed.

How this list was chosen

In a UK small business the CEO is usually also the head of sales, the credit controller and the person who unlocks the building. This list is built for that job rather than for the one the title implies.

The selection leans towards allocation: where to put the next pound and the next hour, what to stop doing, and how to tell the difference between a business that is growing and one that is merely getting busier. Those are the decisions nobody else in the company can make for you.

Also included, deliberately, are one or two on the psychological side of the role. The isolation of it is a practical problem, not a soft one — it distorts judgement, and the books that name it are more useful than the ones that do not.