A working library
Bookshelf
Books I have recommended, returned to, or found myself thinking alongside. This is not a ranking or a finished canon. It is a record of the ideas currently shaping my questions about leadership, work, faith, hospitality, and a life lived in tension.
The shelf begins with every title from my “40 Great Books” list, then follows the trail into books I’ve marked up in Kindle and ideas that surface in my writing. I’ll keep adding to it as the work changes me.
The Opposable Mind
Roger L. Martin
A practical case for holding competing ideas long enough to find a better answer—the intellectual center of Power in the Paradox.
From: The Curiosity GymThe 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman & Kaley Klemp
Leadership as curiosity, responsibility, and a willingness to question the stories we tell ourselves.
From: The Curiosity GymUnreasonable Hospitality
Will Guidara
Care becomes memorable when it moves beyond efficiency and gives people dignity—even when they have not earned it.
From: Fight for Unreasonable HospitalitySetting the Table
Danny Meyer
A touchstone for building organizations around service, people, and the details that make outsiders feel like insiders.
From: 40 Great BooksTeam of Teams
Gen. Stanley McChrystal
How leaders can trade rigid control for shared consciousness and adaptable teams without surrendering clarity.
From: 40 Great BooksConscious Capitalism
John Mackey & Raj Sisodia
An argument that profit and purpose can reinforce one another instead of living on opposite sides of a ledger.
From: 40 Great BooksWork: Its Purpose, Dignity, and Transformation
Daniel M. Doriani
A theological view of work that asks what labor is for, how it breaks, and how ordinary work can serve our neighbors.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Practice
Seth Godin
Creative work becomes real through a practice of shipping—useful friction for anyone tempted to read instead of make.
From: Stop Reading, Start ShippingThe Great Mental Models, Volume 1
Shane Parrish & Rhiannon Beaubien
A set of lenses for seeing a problem from more than one angle and making clearer, less reactive decisions.
From: The Curiosity GymEssentialism
Greg McKeown
The discipline of choosing what matters most—and accepting that saying yes well requires saying no often.
From: 40 Great BooksFour Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
A humane confrontation with finitude: time is not a system to master but a limited life to inhabit.
From: 40 Great BooksDigital Minimalism
Cal Newport
A framework for making technology serve chosen values rather than allowing attention to become the default price of admission.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
John Mark Comer
A spiritual argument for resisting hurry and recovering the unoptimized rhythms that make a life more human.
From: 40 Great BooksSacred Pace
Terry Looper
Discernment before velocity: a reminder that the fastest available decision is not always the faithful one.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel
Money decisions are rarely just mathematical; they expose the stories, fears, and definitions of enough underneath them.
From: 40 Great BooksFair Play
Eve Rodsky
A concrete system for making invisible work visible and sharing responsibility more honestly at home.
From: 40 Great BooksHow to Rock Restaurant Management
Katelyn Silva
A practical, restaurant-floor guide to leading shifts, developing people, and turning daily pressure into a stronger team.
From: 40 Great BooksHow to Win Friends & Influence People
Dale Carnegie
A durable reminder that influence begins with genuine interest, careful listening, and respect for the person in front of you.
From: 40 Great BooksFans First
Jesse Cole
An exuberant case for challenging industry defaults and designing every decision around an unforgettable human experience.
From: 40 Great BooksI Love It Here
Clint Pulver
What changes when leaders build workplaces where people are known, developed, and genuinely want to stay.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Messy Marketplace
Brent Beshore
A candid guide to selling a small business in the real world, where people, incentives, timing, and imperfect information collide.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Infinite Game
Simon Sinek
An invitation to lead beyond the next quarter by building for resilience, purpose, and a horizon longer than any one leader.
From: 40 Great BooksIt's the Manager
Jim Clifton & Jim Harter
A research-backed argument that the everyday manager—not the slogan—is where culture and employee experience become real.
From: 40 Great BooksFaith Driven Entrepreneur
Henry Kaestner, J.D. Greear & Chip Ingram
A framework for treating entrepreneurship as vocation: holding ambition, stewardship, risk, and faith in the same conversation.
From: 40 Great BooksWhat They Teach You at Harvard Business School
Philip Delves Broughton
An insider's account of the models, language, and assumptions through which modern managers learn to see the world.
From: 40 Great BooksThe 4 Disciplines of Execution
Chris McChesney, Sean Covey & Jim Huling
A system for protecting a wildly important goal from the daily whirlwind that makes urgent activity feel like progress.
From: 40 Great BooksTaking People with You
David Novak
Leadership measured not only by destination or speed, but by whether other people grow capable of making the journey with you.
From: 40 Great BooksProcrastinate on Purpose
Rory Vaden
A counterintuitive approach to multiplying time by deliberately delaying, delegating, or eliminating the wrong work.
From: 40 Great BooksCrowning the Customer
Feargal Quinn
Customer care as an operating principle: listen closely, notice friction, and give people reasons to return.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Gatekeepers
Chris Whipple
A study of leadership beside power—how judgment, candor, access, and restraint shape consequential decisions.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Employee Experience Advantage
Jacob Morgan
A practical model for aligning culture, technology, and physical environment around the people doing the work.
From: 40 Great BooksRadical Candor
Kim Scott
The managerial tension between caring personally and challenging directly—neither kindness without truth nor truth without care.
From: 40 Great BooksLeaders Eat Last
Simon Sinek
Leadership as the creation of safety, trust, and belonging so people can spend their energy serving the mission instead of surviving the culture.
From: 40 Great BooksThe 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey
A principle-centered vocabulary for agency, priorities, mutual benefit, deep listening, and continual renewal.
From: 40 Great BooksRocket Fuel
Gino Wickman & Mark C. Winters
The productive tension between visionary imagination and integrator discipline—and why growing organizations usually need both.
From: 40 Great BooksTraction
Gino Wickman
A common operating system for translating vision into priorities, accountability, meetings, and measurable execution.
From: 40 Great BooksMaking Cents of a Dirty Business
Troy Hopkins
Hard-won operating lessons about cash flow, hiring, culture, and building dignity into an unglamorous essential business.
From: 40 Great BooksWhat I Know About Running Coffee Shops
Colin Harmon
An operator's view of hospitality where margins, workflow, quality, staff, and the guest experience meet in thousands of small decisions.
From: 40 Great BooksScaling People
Claire Hughes Johnson
The systems and management craft required to help people retain clarity and humanity as an organization grows.
From: 40 Great BooksThe Dip
Seth Godin
A short guide to the hard distinction between quitting strategically and abandoning work merely because it became difficult.
From: 40 Great BooksWho
Geoff Smart & Randy Street
A structured hiring method built around defining the outcome, gathering evidence, and resisting improvisational selection.
From: 40 Great BooksThe World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
Essays that resist abstraction by returning again and again to place, limits, community, stewardship, and the moral shape of ordinary work.
From: Kindle notebookThe Craftsman
Richard Sennett
A deep exploration of the human impulse to do a job well for its own sake—and how thought, hand, repetition, and judgment form one another.
From: Kindle notebookThe Spirit of the Disciplines
Dallas Willard
Formation happens through embodied practice: the hidden rhythms and disciplines that make a different kind of life possible.
From: Kindle notebookThe Unsettling of America
Wendell Berry
A challenge to economies that separate people from place, production from care, and efficiency from the health of communities.
From: Kindle notebookYou're Only Human
Kelly M. Kapic
A theological case for receiving human limits as gifts rather than failures—an antidote to hurry, shame, and impossible self-sufficiency.
From: Kindle notebookSlow Productivity
Cal Newport
Fewer things, a natural pace, and an obsession with quality—an explicit companion to the case for intentional inefficiency.
From: Essay: Intentional InefficiencyBoth/And Thinking
Wendy K. Smith & Marianne W. Lewis
A research-backed method for treating persistent tensions as material for more creative and sustainable choices.
From: Essay: 9 Mental Models to Embrace TensionDeep Work
Cal Newport
A defense of sustained concentration in environments designed to fragment attention and reward visible busyness.
From: Essay: The Feed Is InfiniteAtomic Habits
James Clear
A practical account of how identity, environment, and small repeated actions compound into meaningful change.
From: Podcast: Josh EtressDigital Liturgies
Samuel D. James
An examination of how online habits become formative practices—and how older forms of wisdom can recover attention and embodiment.
From: Podcast: Samuel JamesMission Drift
Peter Greer & Chris Horst
Why organizations slowly lose the purpose that created them, and the practices leaders use to keep mission operational rather than ornamental.
From: Podcast: Peter GreerThe Great Dechurching
Jim Davis, Michael Graham & Ryan P. Burge
Data and stories behind the largest religious shift in recent American history, resisting simplistic accounts of why people leave churches.
From: Podcast: Michael GrahamUnoffendable
Brant Hansen
A provocative invitation to release the entitlement to anger and replace reflexive offense with humility, curiosity, and grace.
From: Podcast: Tim Sweetman & Chad SmithThe Art of the Commonplace
Wendell Berry
Agrarian essays connecting place, economy, community, fidelity, and the consequences of treating limits as obstacles.
From: Essay: Make America Whole AgainThe Everything Store
Brad Stone
A history of Amazon's relentless customer focus, invention, scale, and the human costs embedded in its operating model.
From: Podcast: Lessons from BezosWorking Backwards
Colin Bryar & Bill Carr
The mechanisms Amazon uses to turn customer obsession into decisions, documents, teams, and repeatable invention.
From: Podcast: Lessons from BezosA Non-Anxious Presence
Mark Sayers
Leadership amid complexity begins with presence: resisting contagious anxiety long enough to discern what renewal requires.
From: Podcast: Daniel DarlingThe Pathless Path
Paul Millerd
A search for a more honest story about work and life after the default ladder stops supplying meaning.
From: Essay: Are You Telling the Truth?The Intentional Father
Jon Tyson
A practical framework for treating fatherhood as formative work built through attention, ritual, courage, and character.
From: Podcast: Josh EtressLove + Work
Marcus Buckingham
A strengths-centered argument for finding the activities that create energy and weaving more of them into ordinary work.
From: Podcast: Josh PackardThe Generosity Factor
Ken Blanchard & S. Truett Cathy
A parable about treating time, talent, treasure, and touch as resources entrusted for the good of other people.
From: Podcast: Truett CathyLead with Prayer
Ryan Skoog, Peter Greer & Cameron Doolittle
Leadership practices shaped by dependence, listening, and prayer rather than competence and control alone.
From: Podcast: Peter GreerGood Energy
Casey Means
A systems-level account of metabolic health and the connections between modern habits, energy, and long-term flourishing.
From: Essay: Make America Whole AgainSwitch
Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Change becomes possible when analytical direction, emotional motivation, and the surrounding environment reinforce one another.
From: Podcast: Josh EtressOnward
Howard Schultz
A founder's account of trying to restore operational discipline without losing the experience, humanity, and soul of a company.
From: Podcast: The Soul of Starbucks