30 Books Every IT Leader Must Read

By Eric Chabrow
Society for Information Management’s 2008 list of leadership books covers a wide-range of subjects, except IT itself.

Books ranging from How to Read a Book to The Prince are among 30 books every CIO wannabe should read, according to an annual list of must-read books issued by the Society of Information Management’s Regional Leadership Forum.

Why no IT books? The books are aimed at IT professionals with aspirations to move into senior management jobs. “At this point in many careers, IT skills per se are not critical success factors,” Bob Rouse, a Regional Leadership Forum executive board member and affiliate associate professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University, writes in an e-mail exchange with CIO Insight.

The list is headed by How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, which furnishes guidelines for critically reading. “Reading is a key skill for continuous learning,” Rouse says. “Rarely have we considered reading as adults carefully or specifically. Adler has created the gourmet guide to reading, serious reading as adults.”

The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli’s political treatise on maintaining order in a principality, written in 1513, is a classic leadership dissertation on how to lead and perhaps most importantly, Rouse says, how not to lead.

Here is the list of the 30 books.

Source: CIO Minute, November 14, 2007.