BOOKS

The following books I’ve either read and loved or they’ve been recommended to me by people I trust and I’ve put them on my reading list. There is no specific order and I’m aiming to keep this list updated, add new books, and scratch the ones that didn’t meet my expectations. If you have more recommendations, you can send them over at katy@katytrost.com.

CEO DEVELOPMENT

• The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building – By Matt Mochary
• CEO Tools 2.0: A System to Think, Manage, and Lead Like a CEO – By Jim Canfield
• Great CEOs and How They Are Made: The Seven Imperatives – By John Wilson
• Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (Techstars) – By Matt Blumberg
• CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest – By Caroline Dewar
• From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business – By Alisa Cohn
• Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell – By Eric Smith
• Upscale: What it takes to scale a startup. By the people who’ve done it – By James Silver
  
• Making Big Happen: Applying The Make Big Happen System to Grow Big – By Mark Moses

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

• Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You – By John Warrilow
• Scale: Seven Proven Principles to Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back – By David Finkel
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap And Others Don’t – By Jim Collins
• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies – By Jim Collins
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement – By Eliyahu M.  Goldratt
• Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It… and Why the Rest Don’t (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) – By Verne Harnish

• Outthink the Competition: How a New Generation of Strategists Sees Options Others Ignore – By Kaihan Krippendorff

• Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours – By Salim Ismail

• The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business – By Josh Kaufman
• Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All – By Jim Collins
• Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days – By Jake Knapp
• The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups – By Daniel Coyle
• High Output Management – By Andrew S. Grove
• The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business – By Patrick Lencioni
• Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity – By Kim Scott
• An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization – By Robert Kegan
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers –  By Geoffrey G. Moore
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business – By Gino Wickman
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time – By Jeff Sutherland
• Exploring Strategy – By Gerry Johnson
• The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth – By Amy Edmonson
• Boards: A Practical Perspective – By Patrick Dunne
• Who: The A Method for Hiring – By Geoff Smart
• Topgrading: The Proven Hiring And Promotion Method That Turbocharges Company Performance – By Bradford D. Smart
• The Fundraising Wisdom that helped Our Founders Raise $18B in Follow-On Capital – First Round
• Invest in Lines, Not Dots – Mark Suster
• Startups that Last – Harvard Business Review
• 10 Tips to Turn Your Startup Board Into a Secret Weapon – Smaipata
• Netflix Culture Deck
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable – By Patrick Lencioni
• Culture By Design – By David Friedman
• The Sales Learning Curve – Harvard Business Review
• Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams (Techstars) – By Matt Blumberg

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

• Principles: Life and Work – By Ray Dalio
• Managing Oneself – Peter F. Drucker
• Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams pull Together and Others Don’t – By Simon Sinek
• Co-Active Coaching: Changing Business, Transforming Lives – By Henry Kimsey-House
• Leading at a Higher Level: Blanchard on How to be a High-Performing Leader – By Ken Blanchard
• Reboot: Leadership And The Art Of Growing Up – By Jerry Colonna
• What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful – By Marshall Goldsmith

• Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries – By Safi Bahcall

• The New One Minute Manager – By Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success – By Jim Dethmer

• Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership – By Joseph Jaworski

• The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities – By Patrick Lencioni
• The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader – By John Maxwell
• The Effective Director: Building Individual and Board Success – By Neville Bain
• Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking – By Matthew Syed

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – By Greg McKeown
• Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind – By David Buss
• Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – By Cal Newport
• High-Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way – By Brendon Burchard
• Psycho-Cybernetics – By Maxwell Matz
• How to Win Friends & Influence People – By Dale Carnegie
• You Can Heal Your Life – By Louise Hay
• The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment – By Eckart Tolle
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – By Yuval Harari
• Awaken the Giant Within – By Anthony Robbins
• Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters – By Alan Miller & Satoshi Kanazawa
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience – By Mihali Csikszentmihalyi
• Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand & Treat Fear – By Joseph Ledoux
• Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life – By Gary John Bishop
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change – By Stephen R. Covey
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life – Mark Manson
• The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure – By Grant Cardone
• Thinking, Fast and Slow – By Daniel Kahneman
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress free Productivity – By David Allen
• Mind-Body Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain – By John E. Sarno M.D.
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – By Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D
• Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior – By Leonard Mlodinow
• The Science of High Performance – By Som Bathla
• 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think – By Brianna Wiest
• Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way – By Rick Carson
• Siddhartha: A Novel – Hermann Hesse
• Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor And Middle Class Do Not – By Robert T. Kiyosaki
• The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere, And Join the New Rich – By Tim Ferriss
• The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Obstacles Into Triumph – By Ryan Holiday
• Think And Grow Rich – By Napoleon Hill
• The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business – By Charles Duhigg
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0 – By Travis Bradberry
• The 12-Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months – By Michael Lennington

• Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want – Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible – By Brian Tracy 

• Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment – By David F. Swensen
• Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life – By Hector Garcia
• Rich Dad Poor Dad – By Robert T. Kiyosaki

TOOLS

The following tools and software I regularly introduce to my clients or they’ve been recommended to me by people I trust. If your are a CEO or senior executive they are worth checking out and possibly implementing into your organization.

• GtmHub – Strategy Execution platform: Shift your Enterprise to a Culture of Outcomes with Better Strategy Execution.
• Monday – Together. In Projects, Processes, and Success: The Work OS that powers remote teams.
• 15 Five – Continuous Performance Management: Boost Employee Performance, Every Week.
• Align – Increase Productivity and Focus on What Matters: Gain visibility on progress and build a culture of transparency and accountability.
• Asana – Keep Your Team Organized and Connected: Stay Focused on your Goals, Projects, and Tasks.
• Culturecode Things – Personal Task Manager That Helps You Achieve Your Goals.
• OmniFocus – Accomplish More Everyday: Tame the chaos, so you can focus on the right tasks at the right time.
• Notion – The All In One Workspace: Write, plan, collaborate, and get organized.
• Jira – Move fast, stay aligned, and build better – together: The #1 software development tool used by agile teams
• Confluence – Accomplish more Together: Remote-friendly workspace where knowledge and collaboration meets.
• Github – Let’s build from here: Harnessed for productivity. Designed for collaboration. Celebrated for built-in security.