The United States is experiencing an unprecedented business formation boom. According to federal data released earlier this year, the past three years have seen more businesses founded in America than ever since official record keeping began.
The trend line remains steady, indicating new businesses will continue to rise.
Unfortunately, many of these businesses will fail within a few years, and fewer still will ever truly thrive. Those who survive and grow are likely to be led by innovative, fearless founders and executives who aren’t shy about learning and applying the best practices of those who came before them.
Some of those ideas are sure to come from current and former colleagues, bosses, and industry peers. Friends, family, and other non-business acquaintances may have some insights to share as well. But tomorrow’s leaders shouldn’t discount advice from total strangers, either—not when those strangers have built or helped scale thriving businesses of their own.
These five authors have done just that. They’ve learned quite a bit on their journeys. If you’re ready to join the next generation of leaders, you’ll want to hear them out.
1. Graci Harkema — Rising
Graci Harkema’s Rising: From a Mut Hut to the Boardroom — and Back Again is a memoir about one woman’s journey from abject poverty in central Africa to the heights of American business life.
Harkema’s story begins with her earliest memories, of a crowded orphanage in her native Congo, and proceeds to the leafy, lily-white streets of her adopted home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Harkema’s childhood was one of wonder and learning, but also of repression and loneliness.
Harkema overcame, of course. Today, she is a nationally renowned business consultant who empowers her clients to think creatively about diversity, equity, racial justice, and gender equality in the boardroom and beyond. She is committed to making workplaces more safe, welcoming, and empowering for people from all walks of life.
And she is not shy about opening up, in real life and to her readers. Through the touching story of her reunion with her birth mother, Harkema reveals the truest parts of herself—while acknowledging that she, like all of us, remains a work in progress.
2. Tammy Heermann — Reframe Your Story
In Reframe Your Story: Real Talk for Women Who Want to Let Go, Do Less and Be More—Together, Tammy Heermann speaks directly to women leaders who feel gaslit, dismissed, or just plain ignored. As a leadership development expert with more than 20 years of experience empowering women to excel in business and life, her advice boils down to a simple but often overlooked directive: Keep it simple.
That’s a bit more complicated than it sounds, of course. Across more than 200 pages of insight-packed prose, Heermann draws on the latest sociological and psychological literature—as well as compelling stories from her clients’ lives and her own—to help present and future leaders break down internal and external barriers to achievement and craft a positive, powerful case for themselves.
3. Michelle Ray — Leading in Real Time
If you feel like you’re losing your bearings amid accelerating cultural and technological change, check out Leading in Real Time: How to Drive Success in a Radically Changing World by Michelle Ray.
Ray’s approachable book leverages years of successful leadership consulting work to demonstrate how to connect on an authentic level with your teams, foster transparency throughout your organization, strengthen collaboration and cross-functionality, and show that you really are accountable for your actions as a leader.
But most importantly, Ray acknowledges what we all know: that disruption will soon become the status quo and that “real-time leadership” is the only remedy for leaders who want to remain relevant.
4. John Doerr — Measure What Matters
In Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs, famed venture capitalist (and early Google investor) John Doerr details the now-famous measurement framework he developed as a young Intel engineer in the 1970s.
Known as Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, it’s a high-velocity, high-fidelity approach for business leaders to analyze what works and what doesn’t. From corporate initiatives to personnel, OKRs help drive investment, prioritization, and promotion decisions with speed and accuracy, allowing leaders to “fail faster” and succeed sooner than the alternatives.
The advice in this book has been tested and proven. Doerr helped deploy the OKR method at more than 50 startups he backed as a venture investor. Including Google itself.
5. Matt Abrahams — Think Faster, Talk Smarter
If you relish the opportunity to get up on stage in front of hundreds, maybe even thousands of people and confidently talk your book, or have supreme confidence in your ability to bring others to your side in high-pressure situations, then Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot might not be for you.
But if you’re like most leaders, you secretly doubt your ability to speak eloquently, forcefully, and convincingly on demand.
In that case, this Matt Abrahams book offers vital lessons for even the most anxious public speakers. His evidence-based approach focuses on techniques like mirroring the audience, simplifying content, and sharpening delivery to provide more compelling and memorable listening experiences.
These lessons apply not just in high-stakes speeches before large audiences, but in more mundane environments like boardroom presentations, job interviews, client meetings, and even informal office settings. Indeed, some of the book’s most valuable lessons center on engaging small-talk ideas, small-bore persuasive tactics, small-group etiquette, and effective techniques to deliver feedback within the chain of command—all without the benefit of extensive preparation.
Empowering Future Leaders
The leaders of tomorrow aren’t born. They’re taught.
This is true in every walk of life, but especially in the business world. In addition to smarts, ambition, and a fair bit of luck, launching and growing an enterprise requires deep curiosity, a willingness to learn, and the humility to learn from failure.
While these five books won’t save you from the occasional setback, they could help you avoid a few painful mistakes. They’ll equip you with insights and experience to help you spot and capitalize on opportunities before everyone else. They may even change how you see the world and, thus, how you engage with your teams, your peers, and even your competitors on your journey to success.
