Refocusing and Recharging: Our Fourth Annual Reading List

Across the world, leaders have come to accept uncertainty and disruption as ubiquitous, permanent factors of our current market economy. With this shift, mindsets and approaches are evolving. The job of steering entire organizations into acculturating necessary levels of adaptability, connectivity, and resilience for this changing world is the tremendous goal ahead.

How does one lead in a world they never could have foreseen? Where is learning that can provide foundation and insight? We have devised this, our fourth Egon Zehnder CEO Insights book list to support leaders facing these enormous questions. Below we are offering books which fall into three categories: 

• Leading Ahead
• Human Leadership
• Revisiting Classics

Our objective is to provide a breadth of perspectives that can offer inspiration to the many leaders searching for knowledge and creativity for the weighty work of leading into an unknown future.

These books help leaders look forward without positing a future that is knowable. Together, they explore disruption, AI, exponential governance, adaptive leadership, and the deeper systems-thinking needed to navigate change over longer time horizons. 

• Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shape Our Modern World by Scott D. Anthony (2025) For leaders facing the next wave of technological change, this book offers a historical lens on how breakthroughs move from novelty to transformation. By better understanding these precedents, this book shows how organizations can approach the forces currently reshaping society and inviting possibilities.
• Future-Proofing Leadership: Navigating Change and Disruption to Thrive in an Uncertain World by Rosie Ward (2026) Ward explores the “stuckness” that keeps people clinging to familiar behaviors under pressure and offers a practical, human-centered roadmap for building adaptability, courage, and trust in turbulent environments.
• In Trees: An Exploration by Robert Moor (2026) Nature writing has become a stealth leadership resource because it trains readers to see systems rather than isolated events. This book introduces “tree-thinking” to understand resilience over long time horizons—an especially useful lens for leaders seeking deeper roots, broader perspective, and more adaptive responses to a chaotic world.
• Artificial Integrity: The Paths to Leading AI Toward a Human-Centered Future by Hamilton Mann (2025) Mann reframes the AI debate around “integrity over intelligence,” arguing that the central leadership challenge is not only what AI can do, but how it can be designed and governed to protect human agency, fairness, and trust. 
• Governing Pandora: Leading in the Age of Generative AI and Exponential Technology by Andrea Bonime-Blanc (2026) This book’s core message is that leaders need an “exponential governance mindset”—one that combines strategic foresight, ethical judgment, resilience, stakeholder awareness, and a clear commitment to keeping humans at the center of technological progress.

The most effective future leaders will not be those who simply move faster, but those who can keep people connected, driven, and grounded. This category focuses on the human capacities that help leaders sustain trust and momentum when the world feels unstable.

• Mattering: The Secret to Building a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose by Jennifer Breheny Wallace (2026) For leaders, the book offers a timely reminder that people-first cultures are built through visible recognition, meaningful contribution, and the daily practices that help people feel known, needed, and aspirational.
• Empathy at Work: Building Better Businesses Through People-First Leadership by Christopher Kaufman (2025) Kaufman argues that empathy is not a soft virtue but a leadership capability that strengthens trust, innovation, accountability, and long-term performance. He shows how vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and shared values can help dismantle toxic workplace patterns and build resilient, high-performing cultures.
• A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan (2026) Blending neuroscience, philosophy, literature, spirituality, and his own reporting, this book challenges narrow, mechanistic views of the mind and invites leaders to think more expansively about perception, attention, and the human capacity for meaning.
• How Great Ideas Happen: The Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success by George E. Newman (2026) Newman reframes creativity as a repeatable process rather than a rare flash of genius, showing how breakthrough ideas often emerge through disciplined exploration, subtle recombination, and persistent refinement. 
• How to be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage by Ranjay Gulati (2025) Courage is not the absence of fear, nor a fixed personality trait, Gulati argues, rather it is a learnable capacity for action under uncertainty. He offers leaders practical ways to moderate fear, speak up, take principled risks, and create cultures where others feel emboldened to act with purpose.

Several prominent older works keep resurfacing because they offer durable ways to understand recurring societal patterns. Examining some angle of the human condition and its patterns, these classics can enlighten leaders as they navigate today’s peculiar complexities.   

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) When anomalies build and an existing framework can no longer explain reality, a new model emerges and reorganizes what people see, value, and accept as truth. For leaders, Kuhn’s classic is a guide to recognizing inflection points: the most important changes that can replace the current paradigm. 
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (1998) Scott’s central concept, “legibility,” explains why well-intentioned efforts can fail when they ignore local knowledge, informal systems, and lived complexity. 
• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (1951) For leaders operating amid polarization and social volatility, the book remains a sharp lens on how movements form, how narratives mobilize people, and why responsible leadership must recognize both the grievances and the need for belonging.
• The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking by Barbara Minto (1987) Minto’s enduring business classic teaches leaders how to organize thinking so that complex ideas can be communicated with clarity, logic, and force.
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (1946) Frankl’s central, lauded insight is that even when people cannot control their circumstances, they retain the capacity to choose their response. The book offers a timeless reminder that endurance is sustained by responsibility, purpose, and the foundational belief that life is deeply meaningful.