Must-reads List

The Culture Map

By Erin Mayer

The book explores how cultural differences impact international business and communication. Meyer introduces a framework to understand various cultural dimensions, such as communication styles, feedback, and decision-making processes.

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Tatiana Cirio | Chief Human Resources Officer

Shoe Dog

By Phil Knight

"Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight is a memoir by the co-founder of Nike, Inc. The book chronicles Knight’s journey from starting Nike in 1964 with a small investment and a vision to turning it into one of the world’s most iconic brands. Through candid storytelling, he provides insights into the highs and lows of his business journey and the people who helped shape Nike’s success.

Matthew Gilbo | Chief Revenue Officer

Good To Great

By Jim Collins

"Good to Great” by Jim Collins explores what differentiates companies that make the leap from being merely good to truly great. Based on extensive research, Collins and his team analyze a set of companies that have sustained exceptional performance over time.

Bruno Bin | Chief Marketing Officer

Diplomacy

By Henry Kissinger

Moving from a sweeping overview of history to blow-by-blow accounts of his negotiations with world leaders, Henry Kissinger describes how the art of diplomacy has created the world in which we live, and how America’s approach to foreign affairs has always differed vastly from that of other nations.

Alan Wright | Chief Operations Officer

“I know this may be a really "wild" submission for book in a business context that most transformed my thinking and how I understand the world. As context, I'm a big believer that the best business leaders are well-read and possess at least some knowledge across a wide range of subjects. As a former wannabe international relations professor, geopolitics has always been super interesting to me. And I really think understanding about "grand strategy" and how nations cooperate or compete is foundational knowledge for understanding how humans, organizations, and societies work.

This book in particular, is the single best synthesis of ONE viewpoint on how world history and geopolitics has played out over the last 2 centuries. I am not endorsing Kissinger's politics, making a statement on his impact/legacy as a statesman, but rather valuing what I learned about how he thinks and assesses the dynamics between major nations. And the ways strategy + tactics work to achieve or fail at producing the desired objectives of a given country or coalition (or in abstract, an entity). Most significantly, overcoming the biases I had to even read this book signaled the importance of valuing knowledge, listening to diverse and sometimes sharply different viewpoints reenforced how important it is to be open-minded and seek to understand from others who think differently than oneself.

In more tangible terms, it reinforced how important it is to have very clear, well defined goals or purpose that drive the actions for a group of people. And how clarity and focus on that ultimate goal needs to be the consistent and central force that dictates decisions around strategy and tactics. And ultimately, whether you succeed or fail depends on how leadership establishes that core goal, sustains focus on it, and is decisive / disciplined in pursuit of that goal (even if the implications of it may be objectionable, face severe resistance, etc.)”