5 books to help leaders in today’s world

A Life in the American Century (2024) By Joseph S Nye Jr

Recommended by Dr Linda Yueh, Adjunct Professor of Economics

The promulgator of the concept of “soft power”, Joe Nye’s autobiography captures his extraordinary life, spanning academia and public service. Nye argued that values and attraction played a significant role in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the early 1990s. Drawing on this insight, he crafted a theory of soft power. 

Soft power is the ability to affect others to obtain preferred outcomes through co-optive means – agenda-setting, persuasion and positive attraction. In short, it’s the ability to get others to want what you want. By contrast, hard power relies on coercion, often through military means. Nye argued that both are essential to effective foreign policy. 

Through public service in both the State Department and the Department of Defence, he sought to apply this theory in practice. Those chapters are among the richest in a fascinating book. He observed that advising policy from the outside can feel like dropping a penny into a well and imagining you hear impact, yet he writes with satisfaction about seeing his ideas deployed in the real world. An essential biography for anyone interested in how ideas shape power in practice.

Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World (2022) By Jacqueline Brassey, Aaron De Smet and Michiel Kruyt

Recommended by Stefano Turconi, Teaching Fellow of Strategy and Entrepreneurship

At a time when speed is celebrated and executives appear permanently busy – accelerating, escalating, rushing – calm remains an uncelebrated leadership quality. Yet today’s decision-makers face a subtler but increasingly consequential challenge: not how to move quicker, but how not to lose themselves while doing so. In Deliberate Calm, Jacqueline Brassey and her co-authors argue that, in fast-changing environments, the scarcest leadership resource is psychological steadiness.

The book’s central move is to treat calm not as a disposition, but as a discipline. Under pressing demands, leaders tend to default to reactivity – narrowing attention, compressing judgment and mistaking urgency for effectiveness. Calm, the authors suggest, works in the opposite direction. It preserves the mental space required for sensemaking, productive disagreement and continuous learning.

What ultimately distinguishes Deliberate Calm is its refusal to romanticise resilience or glorify endurance. Instead, it focuses on everyday practices that allow leaders to remain cognitively and emotionally available when stakes are high and demands intensify. In doing so, it challenges a prevailing leadership aesthetic that equates intensity with impact. For executives operating in contexts where volatility is structural rather than episodic, the book offers a quiet corrective.

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip (April 2026) By Stephen Witt

Recommended by Xinying Liu, LBS Women In Leadership Executive Programme 2019, Managing Director, Origination (Europe), Eliant Trade Finance LP, based in The Netherlands

I must confess that I have explored AI tools such as ChatGPT with near-childlike enthusiasm. While the promises of a revolution in productivity are clear, the flip side is the worry about jobs and the doomsday projection that a super-intelligence will put humans on the evolutionary scrap heap. 

But my worries were soothed when I read this book. It’s a fascinating account of the short history of AI, alongside the personal journey of the charismatic CEO Jensen Huang and how he created the chip giant Nvidia.

The book’s healthy conclusions are that AI tools can help us to assess complex information, but human reality checks against the so-called “hallucinations” will continue to be necessary in the foreseeable future. Professionally, this feels like a win-win. In the fast-moving world of tech innovation, it's inspiring to see how Jensen has shown absolute trust and loyalty in his employees. This may well have been the winning leadership formula in getting Nvidia employees to wholeheartedly explore some of his visionary ideas. Jensen’s daring bet on neural networks and AI have proved right – and Nvidia will continue to enjoy its time in the sun.

The Making of the Modern Company (2022) By Susan Watson

Recommended by Nader Tavassoli, Professor of Marketing

I just read this fascinating book for my integrated EMBA course. A practical read for CEOs, GMs and directors, it clarifies what leaders are actually governing. Watson argues that the modern company is not simply a bundle of shareholder contracts, but an enduring enterprise built around a legally and economically separate “corporate fund”, able to outlive any investor, executive or strategy cycle. That framing pulls the discussion from quarterly claims to institutional stewardship: risk, reputation, resilience and long-term value creation.

Her most useful boardroom contribution is a sharper approach to the shareholder–stakeholder question. Directors’ duties, she contends, are best understood as owed to the company itself, with the board mediating competing stakeholder demands through a disciplined “best interests of the company” lens. For leaders facing ESG scrutiny, activism and systemic shocks, the takeaway is simple: credible governance is not stakeholder theatre – it is fiduciary judgment anchored in the firm’s long-term health.

Coming of Age: How Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the Face of Mena (2025) by Noor Sweid

Recommended by Luisa Alemany, Associate Professor of Management Practice in Strategy and Entrepreneurship; Academic Director, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital

This book is about entrepreneurial leaders, their vision, their passion and hard work. Academic research treats entrepreneurial leadership as a style that mobilises others to recognise, create and exploit opportunities under uncertainty and constraints. Entrepreneurs are thus able to articulate a clear, opportunity-focused direction that helps team members and investors to follow. 

In Coming of Age, Noor Sweid tells the story of MENA’s tech ecosystem through its founders. The book is less a celebration of startup success and more a study in how leaders mobilise others around opportunity in a region – the Middle East – defined by uncertainty.

Many of Sweid’s founders exemplify this. Careem’s co-founder Mudassir Sheikha had to frame ride-hailing not just as a business but as trusted urban infrastructure across fragmented markets. It is an exercise in persuasion as much as execution. Sweid also highlights female founders whose stories challenge stereotypes about who leads in MENA and in high-growth sectors. Mona Ataya of Mumzworld built a category-defining e-commerce platform for mothers in a region where digital retail infrastructure was still nascent; shaping a new market while aligning teams, suppliers and investors around a long-term vision. 

What emerges from Coming of Age is a portrait of leadership that is distinctly entrepreneurial: less about authority and hierarchy, more about passion, coalition-building, risk-taking, resilience and disciplined experimentation.