• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Good Profit by Charles Koch
• Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
• Drive by Daniel Pink
• Measure What Matters by John Doerr
• Range by David Epstein
• How Google Works by Eric Schmidt
• One Hundred Thirteen Million Markets of One by Chris Norton
• Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt
• This is Marketing by Seth Godin
• Getting Naked by Patrick Lencioni
• Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen

Write. You can certainly write something for someone else to read but the discipline of writing itself is jam-packed with saw-sharpening benefits. You must organize your thoughts, stake out a meaningful thesis, support the thesis with facts, strengthen the argument with anecdotes and illustrations, and wrap it in language that spurs action as a result of the new information. Business activities that have been the subject of a writing exercise are understood with more clarity, have survived the gauntlet of dozens of imagined potential pitfalls, and have, in the writer’s mind, already been equipped with the right people and resources.

Ask for feedback. Ask peers. Ask subordinates. Ask vendors. Ask customers. Develop three or four questions for each group. Give them questions that spur candid answers. Ask peers and subordinates about the clarity of your communication and your ability to cast vision and identify actions that move the organization closer to that vision. Ask customers about what it’s like to do business with your company – do the products and services consistently deliver on the brand promise, does your staff create a great customer experience, are there other products or services they’d be willing to buy from you.

Get out of the Office. Here’s the truth most of the time – the larger an organization grows, the farther the boss moves away from the work. If you run a $20 million plumbing company, it’s probably been a while since you unclogged a toilet. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I spend a lot of my time trying to get bosses out of the day-to-day so they can work on the health of the business itself. However, working on the business can never come at the cost of forgetting what it is that causes people to write your company checks or tap their credit cards on a POS terminal. Regular trips to the trenches allow you to remember what it’s like to load a truck, deal with a finicky piece of equipment on the factory floor, present to a difficult prospect, or track down a missing refund.

Try to kill a sacred cow, There is no value in killing a sacred cow just for the sake of killing a sacred cow. However, there is a ton of value in frequently challenging the most fervently held convictions in your organization. The number of activities built around assumptions that are never questioned number in the hundreds in most organizations. That should never be the case. Identify something (a product, a process, an organizational structure, or any number of other things) that’s never been questioned and question it. What if this product become obsolete overnight? What if this production process suddenly becomes “expensive” because a new technology produces the same product in half the time at half the price? What if a customer who accounts for half our revenue is acquired by another company and that revenue dries up?

Taking time to get better at your job and encouraging your team to do the same always pays outsized dividends. In his book, The One Thing, Gary Keller encouraged his readers to never settle for doing something “the best we can do it,” because that makes the ceiling our current level of skill. Instead, we should aim for “the best it can be done,” because implicit in that is idea that we’ll continually keep learning, growing, and experimenting knowing there’s always room for improvement.