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Top shelf picks: Best Business Books 2020

Writers at strategy+business pick the year’s best books in seven categories.

Photograph courtesy of Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Talent & leadership

This year’s best business book on leadership is highly relevant, even essential, for leaders who are seeking to answer the most salient question of the moment: What comes next? In Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time (Public Affairs, 2020), Rosabeth Moss Kanter provides a comprehensive guide for the systemic rebuilding and reimagining that will be required as leaders attempt to negotiate a new future. Changing highly resistant, complex systems is a weighty topic, but this book feels light — not in the sense of being insubstantial, but in being practical and human. Making the transition from helming an established organization to stepping into the moonshot world of social innovation requires that leaders reinvent themselves. Entrepreneurial skills — rare in an institutional setting — are paramount in this undertaking, as are humility and the willingness to hustle.

—Adapted from “Talent & leadership,” by Sally Helgesen