The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Recommended by: Fletcher Richman, Founder & CEO of HALP (Techstars Boulder 2018)

Brief Description: “Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.”

Radical Candor by Kim Scott 

Recommended by: Paul Cothenet CTO at MadKudu (Techstars Boulder 2015)

Brief Description: “Radical Candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss, you have to Care Personally at the same time that you Challenge Directly. When you challenge without caring it’s obnoxious aggression; when you care without challenging it’s ruinous empathy. When you do neither it’s manipulative insincerity.”

15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer

Recommended by: Todd Heine, Founder & CEO of LegalPad (Techstars Seattle 2018)

Brief Description: “You’ll never see leadership the same way again after reading this book.These fifteen commitments are a distillation of decades of work with CEOs and other leaders. They are radical or provocative for many. They have been game changers for us and for our clients. We trust that they will be for you too.Our experience is that unconscious leadership is not sustainable. It won’t work for you, your team or your organization in the long term…”

Good to Great by Jim Collins

Recommended by: Brian Geihsler, Founder & CTO of VendorHawk (Techstars Seattle 2017) 

Brief Description: “Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years…”

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

Recommended by: Anna Barber, Managing Director for Techstars Los Angeles

Brief Description: “In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact.

Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks sevenessential coaching questions to demonstrate how--by saying less and asking more--you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.”

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal

Recommended by: Cristina Vila, Founder & CEO of Cledara (Techstars London 2019)

Brief Description: “When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter.”

Scaling Up by Verne Harnish

Recommended by: Max Faingezicht, Techstars Mentor, Founder & CEO of ThriveHive (Techstars Boston 2015)

Brief Description: “Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) is the first major revision of this business classic which details practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. This book is written so everyone — from frontline employees to senior executives — can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm…”

Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Recommended by: Shaun Johnson, Techstars Mentor and co-founder of Startup Institute

Brief Description: “In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.”

Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux

Recommended by: Sofie Blakstad, Founder & CEO of Hive (Techstars Berlin 2019)

Brief Description: “The way we manage organizations seems increasingly out of date. Survey after survey shows that a majority of employees feel disengaged from their companies. The epidemic of organizational disillusionment goes way beyond Corporate America-teachers, doctors, and nurses are leaving their professions in record numbers because the way we run schools and hospitals kills their vocation. Government agencies and nonprofits have a noble purpose, but working for these entities often feels soulless and lifeless just the same…”

The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Recommended by: Nina Iordanova, Founder & CEO at Hello Iris (Techstars Montreal AI 2019)

Brief Description: “Where does great culture come from? How do you build and sustain it in your group, or strengthen a culture that needs fixing? In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world’s most successful organizations—including the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs—and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation, and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind…”