The best business and management books of 2024

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A good business and management book should provoke us. It should force us to reassess practices, habits and assumptions. It should be unsettling, exposing gaps in our knowledge and actions, yet at the same time exciting and enchanting, offering new ideas and options.

As I reviewed the ones I read in 2024, it struck me how often the best books prodded and poked, revealing new insights and recasting my thinking. Here’s the top 10:

1. The Five Talents that Really Matter by consultants Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton: Based on 58,000 talent assessments, they cite seven commonly accepted practices companies use in talent selection that are wrong; argue leadership is a compendium of talents that different people express in their own unique way so there is no one magic bullet; present five leadership skills that stand out; and alongside that expose where common management thinking and actions could be misguided. It’s an illuminating and continually provocative barrage of research-based information.

2. The Problem with Change by veteran HR executive Ashley Goodall: This is an all-out assault on what he labels “the cult of disruption” that has overtaken organizations, leading us to work as if trapped in a blender. He argues too many top leaders worship these commandments: Large-scale change is necessary, always; instigating change is the way to win; and if you are not disrupting every element of your operations, you are losing. He insists that’s wrong, wrong, wrong and urges us to refocus on the human beings around us and, in particular, the teams within which they bond and produce.

3. Slow Productivity by Georgetown University professor Cal Newport: He believes the dirty secret of knowledge work is that we don’t know how to measure it and instead embrace pseudo-productivity: Busyness. Dismissing that metric as a mere premise, he takes us on a tour of successful people over the ages in support of his counter-premise, slow productivity, which comes in three parts: Do fewer things; work at a natural pace; and obsess over quality.

4. Co-Intelligence by Wharton innovation professor Ethan Mollick: His dabbling into artificial intelligence has led to a popular blog and now this book, where he explains how to build familiarity with AI in our own work, what organizations can do to harness co-intelligence, and the societal implications of the new technology. It’s an accessible guide to a new, mysterious world that we are entering.

5. Supercommunicators by journalist Charles Duhigg: He notes that “communication is the air that we breathe. The right conversation, at the right moment, can change everything.” Some people are better at this human act and he shares what makes them special, including asking 10 to 20 times as many questions as others and constantly adjusting how they communicate, in order to match their companions.

6. Say What They Can’t Unhear, by message strategist Tamsen Webster: She outlines what we should adopt as the Golden Rule of Change Management: Don’t use approaches to persuade others that you wouldn’t tolerate yourself. She adds that change isn’t just an action, it’s a reaction, and shares nine principles to guide you, along with many specifics – things to avoid, things to try. The book covers a lot of territory and can get complicated over what to do when, but the advice is solid.

7. Good Judgment by Richard Davis, managing director of Russell Reynolds Associates in Toronto: This outlines a method of deep dive interviews with job candidates that can help uncover and assess five critical personality traits: Intellect, emotionality, sociability, drive and diligence. We have been told not to pay a lot of attention to personality in job interviews but those traits can reveal future effectiveness or destructiveness.

8. Uptime by Google’s productivity expert Laura Mae Martin: She works in the office of the CEO at the company, counselling executives and those in the ranks on how to be more effective, and her book is loaded with practical advice, much you may not have encountered or taken to heart. It’s all aimed to get you to stop bragging about how busy you are and instead to tout how balanced you are.

9. Never Not Working by University of Georgia psychologist Malissa Clark: This tackles workaholism, warning that studies found no evidence it equates with added productivity and better performance, and detailing the dangers to individuals, organizations and society. She calls on managers to assess the level of overwork in their organization and what is perpetuating it, and to reduce its occurrence.

10. Higher Ground by New York University professor Alison Taylor: We often hear that ethics is simple – a matter of right and wrong – but she shows how it can be a tangle of confusing traps for organizational leaders to oversee, making it tricky and dangerous. There are no simple answers here, just a detailed examination of some of the complications accompanied with advice on what approach is the most realistic in different situations that will arise.

Cannonballs

• Other standouts were How Leaders Learn by David Novak; Cultures of Growth by Mary C. Murphy; 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People by David Yeager; Leading Through by Kim B. Clark, Jonathan R. Clark, and Erin E. Clark; and I Hate Job Interviews by Sam Owens
• If you’re looking for gripping read about companies these three books are superb: Supremacy by Bloomberg technology columnist Parmy Olson, on the battle between AI companies; Rogers v. Rogers by Globe and Mail reporter Alexandra Posadzki, on that company’s internal battles; and The Shopify Story by journalist Larry MacDonald.
• If you like to learn about leadership from biography and history, An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin is worth checking out. Her husband, Richard Goodwin, was a high-level aide to President John F. Kennedy and then wrote the most acclaimed speeches by President Lyndon Johnson on civil rights and The Great Society. After breaking with Mr. Johnson over the Vietnam War, he worked on the primary campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and his pal Robert F. Kennedy. Before Mr. Goodwin’s death, the couple set out to revisit the 1960s – she has been an aide to Mr. Johnson as well before becoming a presidential historian – and the result is homage to their unfinished romance but also our collective unfinished romance with that era.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.