By: The Capella University Editorial Team with Bradly Roh, PhD, DBA, Interim Dean and Vice President, School of Business, Technology and Health Care Administration
Reading time: 3 minutes
You can find shelf after shelf of books that promise to help business professionals get ahead. Which ones offer the best advice?
Here are seven books packed with insight to help you lead, adapt and navigate the business world.
By Ethan Mollick (2024)
With human oversight, AI can help with many daily tasks – the trick is knowing what it’s actually good at.
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick treats AI less like a tool and more like a strange new coworker, one that’s brilliant at some tasks and surprisingly bad at others. He calls this uneven mix of ability the “jagged frontier,” and offers four simple rules for working alongside AI without losing your own judgment in the process – including always inviting AI into your work early, and never fully trusting its first answer.
For professionals still figuring out where AI fits into their day-to-day, this book is a practical, clear-eyed starting point.
By Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, Robert Levin, Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky (2026)
Most companies aren’t struggling to experiment with AI – they’re struggling to get past the experiment.
Drawing on their consulting work with major companies, the authors found that getting AI working at scale takes six coordinated shifts – building a transformation roadmap, developing talent, redesigning the operating model, building the right technology environment, embedding data throughout the organization and driving adoption and scaling – and skipping one is usually why transformations stall. The book’s updated edition sharpens that framework for a business landscape where AI has moved from novelty to necessity.
By A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin (2025)
Effective strategy requires organizations to make deliberate choices about where they compete and how they can create an advantage.
Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley and strategist Roger Martin walk through the framework they used to turn around brands like Olay: 1) define winning, 2) choose where to play, 3) decide how to win there, 4) build the capabilities to support it and 5) put the management systems in place to sustain it. This expanded edition adds fresh cases for a business environment shaped by AI and faster competitive cycles.
By Amy C. Edmondson (2023)
Not all failure is created equal – and treating every mistake the same way can quietly wreck a team’s ability to innovate.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson breaks failure into three categories: basic (avoidable), complex (a mix of factors even careful people can’t fully predict) and intelligent (a well-reasoned risk that just didn’t pan out). Only by telling them apart, she argues, can leaders build teams that experiment boldly instead of playing it safe out of fear.
Edmondson’s research on psychological safety has shaped how top companies think about risk – this book puts that thinking into practice.
By Michael Bungay Stanier (2016)
Effective leadership is not always about providing answers.
Michael Bungay Stanier builds his approach around seven questions designed to break the habit of jumping in with advice, starting with the deceptively simple, “What’s on your mind?” The goal is to help employees work through problems themselves instead of outsourcing them upward. This can pay off in the form of managers with tools to keep them from being overwhelmed and teams ready to work more effectively.
By Adam Grant (2023)
Talent gets the credit, but Adam Grant argues character is what actually determines how far someone goes.
Grant makes the case that the ability to seek discomfort, stay open to being a beginner again and push through imperfect first attempts matters more than aptitude – and that these are learnable traits. He backs it up with examples ranging from underdog Olympic teams to unlikely career turnarounds.
For leaders trying to develop people rather than just hire for polish, this book helpfully reframes the actual source of potential.
By Adam Grant (2021)
Business environments change quickly, which makes it vital to review your assumptions and look for new ways to think and strategize.
Adam Grant argues that most people default to thinking like preachers, prosecutors or politicians – defending beliefs, attacking others or currying favor. What actually leads to better decisions, he says, is thinking like a scientist: treating opinions as hypotheses to test, not identities to protect.
For leaders making decisions in fast-changing, uncertain environments, flexibility is a valuable skill.
We've received your message and will get back to you soon.
