Read/Listen To Business Leadership Books For Free!

by | Nov 18, 2021 | Free Resource, Business

We all have things to learn when it comes to business…

Especially being the type of leader that your employees want to follow. Why not step up your game with leadership books…. for free?!?! I listen to audiobooks on my commute. It uses time that may have been wasted to improve my knowledge, skills, etc.

So, how do I listen to audiobooks for free? No, I’m not breaking any laws! It is 100% legal.

Enter…. your public library + Libby. What’s the catch? Your digital library may not have every book out there. There are also limited “copies” available and sometimes you have to put a book on hold and wait in line.

#1 | Get a Library Card (if you don’t have one)

Library cards are free and easy to acquire. Just stop by a library that’s close by where you live and get yourself one! Not only does it give you access to the physical library, but it will give you access to the DIGITAL LIBRARY.

#2 | Download the Libby App

It’s in the App Store and the Google Play Store. You can check it out on the Libby website. Or just search for Libby in your store and look for this icon:

#3 | Attach Your Library Card

Libby offers a couple of different ways to attach your library card to your app, either way, just follow the instructions to get started.

#4 | Start Reading or Listening

You can use Libby to read eBooks or listen to Audiobooks. You can set your preferences in the app.

Now, what should you listen to? Well, I’ve listened to all of the following books and think they are definitely worth your while!

Never Split The Difference – Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations―whether in the boardroom or at home.

** A Wall Street Journal Bestseller **

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles―counterintuitive tactics and strategies―you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.

Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.

Extreme Ownership – How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win

From Jocko Wilnick, the New York Times best selling author of Discipline Equals Freedom and Leadership Strategy and Tactics, an updated edition of the blockbuster bestselling leadership book that took America and the world by storm, two U.S. Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special forces unit of the Iraq War demonstrate how to apply powerful leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life.

Combat, the most intense and dynamic environment imaginable, teaches the toughest leadership lessons, with absolutely everything at stake. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin learned this reality first-hand on the most violent and dangerous battlefield in Iraq. As leaders of SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, their mission was one many thought impossible: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a violent, insurgent-held city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping, firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories, they learned that leadership―at every level―is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.

Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training to pass on their harsh lessons of self-discipline, mental toughness and self-defense learned in combat to help forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After leaving the SEAL Teams, they launched a company, Echelon Front, to teach those same leadership principles to leaders in businesses, companies, and organizations across the civilian sector. Since that time, they have trained countless leaders and worked with hundreds of companies in virtually every industry across the U.S. and internationally, teaching them how to develop their own high-performance teams and most effectively lead those teams to dominate their battlefields.

Since it’s release in October 2015, Extreme Ownership has revolutionized leadership development and set a new standard for literature on the subject. Required reading for many of the most successful organizations, it has become an integral part of the official leadership training programs for scores of business teams, military units, and first responders. Detailing the resilient mindset and total focus principles that enable SEAL units to accomplish the most difficult combat missions, Extreme Ownership demonstrates how to apply them to any team or organization, in any leadership environment. A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, Extreme Ownership challenges leaders everywhere to fulfill their ultimate purpose: lead and win.

Good Leaders Ask Great Questions

A #1 New York Times bestselling author and leadership expert answers questions from his readers about what it takes to be in charge and make a difference.
John Maxwell, America’s #1 leadership authority, has mastered the art of asking questions, using them to learn and grow, connect with people, challenge himself, improve his team, and develop better ideas. Questions have literally changed Maxwell’s life. In GOOD LEADERS ASK GREAT QUESTIONS, he shows how they can change yours, teaching why questions are so important, what questions you should ask yourself as a leader, and what questions you should be asking your team.

Maxwell also opened the floodgates and invited people from around the world to ask him any leadership question. He answers seventy of them–the best of the best–including . . .

What are the top skills required to lead people through difficult times?

  • How do I get started in leadership?
  • How do I motivate an unmotivated person?
  • How can I succeed working under poor leadership?
  • When is the right time for a successful leader to move on to a new position?
  • How do you move people into your inner circle?

No matter whether you are a seasoned leader at the top of your game or a newcomer wanting to take the first steps into leadership, this book will change the way you look at questions and improve your leadership life.

Atomic Habits – An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

The #1 New York Times bestsellerOver 3 million copies sold!

Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving–every day. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you’ll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Learn how to:
  make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);
  overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;
  design your environment to make success easier;
  get back on track when you fall off course;
…and much more.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits–whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age

Celebrating the 75 anniversary of the original landmark bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People, comes an up-to-the-minute adaptation of Carnegie’s timeless prescriptions for the digital age.

Dale Carnegie’s principles have endured for nearly a century. Since its original publication in 1936, his timeless classic How to Win Friends and Influence People has gone on to sell 15 million copies. Now, introducing new listeners to Carnegie’s words of wisdom, comes How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, a new guide for a new era.

Dale Carnegie could never have predicted the trajectory that new media would take, and the ways that the simple television screen would be adapted into computers and handheld communication devices. He didn’t know the term “social media” and Facebook was something not even dreamed of in Buck Rogers cartoons. And yet his lessons remain relevant for everyone who communicates online today. In fact, with problems such as cyber bullying and email etiquette, we need Carnegie’s help more than ever. Dale Carnegie and Associates, Inc. has re-imagined Carnegie’s lasting lessons for this difficult digital age, reframing Carnegie’s insights about communication, self-expression, and leadership. This book is a must-have guide for anyone who wants to find success on Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, and any social media format today and in the future.

Outliers – The Story of Success

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

The Boys In The Boat

The #1 New York Times–bestselling story about the American Olympic rowing triumph  in Nazi Germany—from the author of Facing the Mountain.

For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.

It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys’ own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man’s personal quest.

Talking to Strangers

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangersand why they often go wrong.

A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press

 How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true?

Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt.

Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

May Not Be In Your Digital Library

The following aren’t currently in the Indiana Digital Library, but you can find them other places, like Audible.

Take The Stairs – 7 Steps to Achieving True Success

The New York Times bestseller that will help you get off the “escalator” and tackle the work that leads to real success

How do successful people achieve results? In short, they do it the old-fashioned way, with focus and self-discipline. Popular speaker and strategist Rory Vaden presents a simple program for “taking the stairs”—that is, resisting the temptations of “quick fixes,” eliminating distractions, and transcending personal setbacks in order to reach your goals.

Whatever your vision of success is, this proven program will help you get there—one stair at a time.

Excellence Wins – A No-Nonsense Guide To Becoming The Best In A World of Compromise

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, co-author of Built to Last: “Horst Schulze created a culture of service that should be a model for all of us. By committing to the highest standards of professionalism – and creating the right systems to achieve them – he inspired thousands to embrace the core ideal of sheer unadulterated excellence. Schulze now shares his story, and his methods, so that the rest of us can be uplifted and taught by the master himself.”

Dan Cathy, chairman and CEO, Chick-fil-A: “Horst Schulze’s influence on my family and our business is undeniable. His approach to customer service revolutionized the hotel industry and set a high bar for all of us. His new book, Excellence Wins, weaves Horst’s personal story with the practical wisdom he’s gleaned from an incredible career of servant leadership. It’s a must read for leaders and anyone passionate about serving people.”

***

Your blueprint for becoming the very best in a world of compromise.

Horst Schulze knows how to win. In Excellence Wins, Schulze, in his absolute no-nonsense approach, shares the visionary and disruptive principles that have produced immense global successes over the course of his still-prolific fifty-year career.

As the cofounder and former president of Ritz-Carlton Hotel Co., Schulze fearlessly led the company to unprecedented multi-billion dollar growth, setting the business vision and people-focused standards that made the Ritz-Carlton brand globally elite.

Schulze’s principles are both versatile and utterly practical to leaders of every age, career stage, and industry. You don’t need a powerful title or a line of direct reports–you have everything you need to use them right now.

Unleash the disruptive power of your true potential, beat the competition, own your career trajectory, and experience the game-changing proof firsthand: Excellence Wins.

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