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January 2, 2025
By Verne Harnish
Thrive in 2025 by reviewing the fundamentals in these five books with your team. Choose someone on the leadership team to read one of them – all (with one exception) published in the past year – and share a couple of ideas to jump-start and/or accelerate engagement, growth, profit and cash.
Organized around the key decisions in our Scaling Up framework – People, Strategy, Execution, Cash and Personal – here’s the top book for each to help you scale. Enjoy.
PEOPLE – Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship by Keith Ferrazzi
Grab a copy and go right to Chapter 4. Notes Ferrazzi:
Fifty-eight percent of employees say that they trust strangers more than they trust their own associates at work.
The key to overcoming this is scheduling some fun bonding events in 2025 – similar to the dogfight pickup football game in Top Gun: Maverick. Active quarterly themes with celebrations, a key component of Scaling Up, are key to building teamwork.
Then read the rest of Ferrazzi’s excellent book to nail the little things that create a much more engaged and effective team. Think about implementing one idea per month or quarter.
STRATEGY – Scale Up Faster: The Secrets of the World’s Quickest-Growing Bootstrapped Companies by Pete Martin
Pete Martin, a kindred spirit in the growth movement, embarked on a 2 ½-year odyssey to unlock the secrets of the top 1 percent of performers among the Inc 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The result is Scale Up Faster. It’s a treasure trove of battle-tested and specific strategies for entrepreneurs who want to break free from the pack.
Here are three of many specific insights, the first being my favorite:
- They had one way of selling that had a high close ratio – one extremely focused approach.
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the most-read book by Bootstrapped Fast Growth (BFG) companies.
- These firms focused on the “job to be done” for customers.
EXECUTION – How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
How do you bring in one-of-a-kind creative projects, ranging from remodeling your kitchen to constructing a multi-billion-dollar cultural institution, on time and under budget? The authors detail seven key steps in an entertaining and insightful way.
The two contrasting big projects used to open the book – the Sydney Opera House and the Guggenheim in Bilbao – highlight the differences between an iconic project that came in over budget by 700 percent and ruined the career of its young 36-year-old architect and the other, which delivered on time and under budget by 3% and launched the career of famed architect Frank Gehry.
The keys to success include lots of upfront iterations before starting the project, creating the right culture for the team (including ample use of posters!), liberally utilizing reference projects, and taking a Lego approach to assembling.
It’s a fun read, providing the back stories behind iconic projects around the globe we’re all familiar with. Once you’ve enjoyed them, apply the authors’ ideas to your next big project driving your scale.
CASH – Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
Yes, please read it again – and again. Going through it for a fourth time, I’m still picking up ideas I missed the first three times from the entrepreneur who right now has more business and political influence than anyone on the planet.
And yes, I chose it as one of the five top biz books of 2023. It’s just that there clearly wasn’t a better CEO biography (for which I reserve this category) in 2024. His “algorithm” is the soul of all his businesses – a mantra that is repeated at the beginning of each of his daily huddles and weekly meetings. Look it up and practice it within your own firm. The key? Eliminating all the dumb stuff BEFORE automating – otherwise you’re just speeding up a mess.
My favorite moment in the book is when he’s kicked out of PayPal yet goes and breaks bread with each of the partners to maintain their relationships. Later, when he badly needed $20 million, these same partners stepped up and saved him. That’s EQ, for those who claim Musk has none. Absorbing the lessons in this book could transform your business in 2025 – and beyond.
PERSONAL – Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve by Alison Fragale
Warmth and competence – the two dimensions on which we immediately judge most people – are the basis for noted research psychologist, professor, and consultant Alison Fragale’s book Likeable Badass, recommended highly by Adam Grant.
As Fragale points out, status (perceived competence) is how you get influence and power vs. the opposite. How you attain this status – in combination with your personal warmth – makes you a Likeable Badass. It’s a quick and fun read with some surprising insights, like the importance of obtaining status to convey competence (i.e., a Harvard appointment). Although Fragale wrote the book with women in mind, much of the advice is relevant for men, personally, and for those who mentor women or have daughters in the workplace.
Set a goal for 2025 to seek an emblem of status, like writing a book, and to be much more likable – she teaches you how.
