5 Books Every Technology Leader Should Read in 2026
Five books for leading through constant change: owning outcomes, creating operational discipline, building trust, understanding AI, and navigating uncertainty.
Read the recommendation → Recommended reading
Books I recommend.
Books that have shaped how I lead teams, set strategy, and think about technology's role in a business. I keep the list short and update it occasionally.
100% Responsibility
Gore and Lehfeldt's practical guide to full personal accountability, and why the toolkit matters more than the slogan.
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Atomic Habits
Clear turns habit research into usable systems; small changes compound, and that holds for teams and compliance programs as well as personal routines.
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Better, Simpler Strategy
Oberholzer-Gee reduces strategy to a single value framework you can hold in your head, which is exactly what makes it usable in a real meeting.
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Change the Culture, Change the Game
Connors and Smith show that results come from beliefs and experiences, not slogans; change what people experience and the culture follows.
Read the recommendation →Character & Culture: A Field Guide to Culture Change
A Team Trek field guide arguing that culture is the sum of individual character, with practical steps toward a workplace built on trust and respect.
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Eat That Frog!
Tracy's 21 short techniques against procrastination, built on one rule: do the hardest, most important task first, before the day takes over.
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Extreme Ownership
Willink and Babin's uncompromising case that leaders own everything in their world, plus the underrated second half on decentralized command.
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Good to Great
Collins's research on what separates great companies from good ones; the people-first discipline has proven the most durable idea in my own work.
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Implementing World Class IT Strategy
High's execution-focused guide to building IT strategy from the business plan outward, the closest book on this shelf to my actual job description.
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Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping to Add Value and Eliminate MUDA
Rother and Shook's field manual on value stream mapping: map the current state, design the future state, and find the waste hiding between them.
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Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others
Sobel and Panas show how the right question opens a conversation that a pitch never will, with short stories of each question in use.
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Selling to Zebras
The Kosers on why most sales effort is wasted on the wrong prospects, and how a precise ideal customer profile changes the whole operation.
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Sideline C.E.O.
Smith interviews winning coaches about motivation, pressure, and culture; leaders whose results are on a public scoreboard every week.
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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Lencioni's fable about why teams fail, starting with absence of trust. A model I have returned to when building leadership teams.
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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Covey's principle-centered approach to effectiveness, built on character rather than technique. Still the foundation decades later.
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The Ideal Team Player
Lencioni's three virtues of a strong team member, humble, hungry, and smart about people, and what happens when one is missing.
Read the recommendation →QTNT
Gillis offers a simple formula for quantifying your workplace contribution, so you can talk about your value in numbers instead of adjectives.
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The Truth About Employee Engagement
Lencioni's fable on the three root causes of job misery: anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement, and why the fixes sit with the manager.
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The SPEED of Trust
Covey makes the case that trust is an economic driver, not a soft skill. This book changed how I approach leadership relationships.
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Traction
Wickman's Entrepreneurial Operating System: plain tools for running a business on vision, people, data, issues, process, and traction.
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World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs
High's five principles for running an IT organization, ordered from people and infrastructure up through strategic business alignment.
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