Why I keep a list of books that changed my view of leadership

There are a few habits that have quietly shaped the way I work, and one of them sits in a battered A5 notebook on my desk. Whenever I finish a book that genuinely shifts something in how I think about leadership, I write the title down, the year I read it, and two or three lines about what it did to my head. The list has grown over two decades of broadcasting, writing and speaking, and I treat it like a mirror. When I look at it, I can see exactly which seasons of my career were about confidence, which were about listening, and which were about the harder task of letting go.

I started keeping the list because I realised my view of what a leader could be had become too small. I had inherited a narrow script from the television studios I worked in, and I wanted to read past it. A book is a slow conversation with someone who has already thought for years about a question you have just met, and a notebook full of those conversations is a portable board of advisers. I find myself returning to it before keynote speeches, before difficult editorial decisions, and on the train between meetings, even though most of my long journeys are on UK rail rather than the routes that link Perth to Sydney.

How a notebook full of titles became a leadership tool

The list began by accident. In my late twenties, working on a breakfast show, I had a producer who lent me a leadership book and told me to read it before our next planning meeting. I loved it, scribbled the title on a Post-it note, and kept the note on the edge of my laptop screen. A second book came, then a third, and the Post-it notes turned into a Moleskine. After a year I had twenty titles, and after five years I had lost count of them entirely.

The books clustered around the same themes at different times in my life, and that pattern is what made the list useful. While I was building This Girl Is On Fire, the titles were about resilience and reinvention. While I was negotiating a new presenting contract, they were about negotiation and voice. While I was supporting my daughter through exam stress, they were about patience and quiet authority. The list became a record of what I had needed, in order, and that record is now a map of my growth as a leader. I share the practice with the women I mentor, and I have written more about why financial independence for women sits alongside personal growth in my own work.

The first book that quietly rewired my thinking

Every list has a beginning, and mine begins with a book I picked up in a hospital waiting room while my mother was having surgery. It was a slim management title, the kind you find in airport bookshops, and I expected very little from it. Instead, it made the simple case that leadership is not a personality type but a set of practices you can learn. That single idea cracked something open for me. Until then I had assumed that good leaders were born that way, charismatic and certain, and that the rest of us were stuck being competent followers.

Once I accepted that leadership was something I could rehearse, my behaviour changed. I started volunteering to chair meetings I would previously have sat quietly in. I raised my hand for the difficult internal reviews. I asked for feedback in a way I had avoided for years, and I made peace with the discomfort of being seen to learn. The book was not especially clever, and its prose was forgettable, but it taught me to act before I felt ready, and that has shaped every decision since. I often think about it when I meet early-career colleagues who are convinced they need another qualification, another badge, another permission slip, before they can step up.

Voices that pushed past my assumptions about authority

Once I had given myself permission to lead, I needed to understand authority. The next phase of my reading was about power, who gets it, and who is overlooked. I devoured books on quiet leadership, on followership, on the difference between positional power and real influence. Susan Cain's work on introverts helped me understand that the loudest voice in the room is rarely the most useful one. Brené Brown's writing on vulnerability reframed courage for me as the willingness to be seen before you have figured everything out.

Then came the harder books, the ones that made me uncomfortable. I read histories of women who had led quietly for centuries, biographies of leaders whose methods I did not always admire, and essays on race, class and the unspoken rules of boardrooms. I learnt that authority can be generous or corrosive, and that the difference depends on what the leader refuses to do. I had to sit with books I disagreed with, too, and let them sharpen my thinking rather than confirm it. It is one of the reasons I keep returning to the work of original photographers and visual thinkers, because a single iconic photograph can do in a frame what a chapter of argument takes twenty pages to achieve.

How I weigh one book against another

After a few years the list grew unwieldy, and I started scoring each title against three questions. First, did it change a behaviour of mine, or only an opinion? Second, would I still reread it in five years? Third, did it travel across cultures, or did it only describe one industry or one country? Below is the comparison I keep in the back of my notebook, with a handful of titles I have returned to again and again, and one or two I am no longer sure about.

The table is not a ranking, and I would not want anyone to read it that way. A book that scores high on behaviour change and low on reread value still has its place, because the moment of disruption is the point. I show this comparison when I am invited to speak to senior leaders in Sydney or Melbourne, and the conversations it sparks are often the most useful part of the visit.

Lessons that travel well to Australian boardrooms

Australia has its own leadership weather, and the books I bring with me when I speak at events in Brisbane or Perth are slightly different from the ones I recommend in London. The sheer scale of the country means that distributed leadership matters more. A chief executive in Kalgoorlie is running a very different operation from one in Canberra, and the tyranny of distance forces a kind of humility that smaller markets do not demand. I have sat with executives at gatherings on the Mornington Peninsula and heard them say that the best leadership book they ever read was one on remote team management, because their people fly in and out of regional hubs and across time zones every week.

Australian readers tend to be sceptical of imported wisdom, and rightly so. They want the principle, then they want to know how it lands on Australian soil, with Australian workplaces, Australian public holidays, and the realities of a country that runs on FIFO rosters and summer cricket. The lessons do not always come from business sections either. The captaincy of Meg Lanning, the long rebuild of Australian cricket culture under Pat Cummins, and the rise of AFLW have given me new vocabulary about shared standards, the slow work of building trust, and the discipline of staying in the fight when results take time. The latest reflections on my work include upcoming speaking dates across the region.

Why the list keeps growing and what it gives me

The list keeps growing because leadership keeps changing. A book that mattered to me at thirty-eight is not always the book that matters at fifty-four. Menopause, divorce, a global pandemic, the rise of AI, and the wider reckoning on equality and power have each rewritten what I need from a page. I have read more in the last three years than I did in the previous ten, partly because the questions have got harder, and partly because I am no longer embarrassed to read slowly and reread often. Reading well, it turns out, looks a lot like leading well. Both ask you to sit with complexity longer than you would like, to listen past your own defence mechanisms, and to revise your position without losing your nerve.

I keep the list because it reminds me that leadership is a practice, not a personality. It reminds me that every strong opinion I hold today is probably one good book away from being upgraded, and that humility on the page is rehearsal for humility on stage. It reminds me that the women and men I admire most are readers, people who treat a quiet hour with a book as seriously as any keynote they have ever delivered. If you are building your own list, start with the question that keeps you awake at night, then ask which living or dead leader has already lost sleep over the same one. Their answer is on a shelf, waiting.