Read Biographies, Not Business Books. Advice for Small Business Owners.

Let’s say you’re a small business owner and want to learn more about leadership. Where do you go?

A lot of people would start with a quick search of Amazon’s leadership books. Or the business section of your local bookstore.

That’s not a bad option. We’ve done it ourselves.

But here’s an even better idea.

Try the history shelf.

“What?” you ask. “But I want to learn about leadership, not some boring history.”

Rather than reading about the theory of leadership, why not read about people who actually practiced it and learn how they did it?

Pick up a book on leadership and the author might suggest that you inspire followers with big ideas, or bold actions, or even an insightful vision.

Pick up a history book (or three) and you will learn from someone like John F. Kennedy who inspired a nation with the big idea of putting a man on the moon. Or you could read about how George Washington built a fort around Boston in a single winter night to win a stunning defeat over the British. Now there’s a bold action. Or you could learn how Lou Gerstner set the long-term vision and strategy for IBM that saved the company.

There’s a fantastic little book called Humilitus: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership. Read it and you’ll learn a lot about humility. But you could also pick up Doris Kearns Goodwin’s stellar book, Team of Rivals, and read about how Lincoln learned and practiced humility and accepted his defeats, then turned his competitors into friends and future backers.

You could pick up a book like Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and learn a lot about how not to lead a company (berating employees, lying, and playing politics) at the same time you might learn to appreciate how he practiced intuition and total devotion to creating great products.

Of course, biographies aren’t the only option. There are company histories as well. Instead of reading Seth Godin’s The Dip about fighting through the low points of a start-up, why not read Pour Your Heart Into It about how Howard Shultz fought through the dip to save Starbucks from failure. More than once.

Instead of reading a book on strategy, why not read a book like Behind The Cloud which details Marc Benioff’s strategy for pioneering the software as a service model and marketing his company with unexpected and imaginative public relations ideas.

The list goes on.

While business books are great (we read a stack of them every year), you can learn even more from the people who accomplished great things, overcame long odds, and helped build the future we live in.

Try it some time. Grab a history and see what you can learn.

And of course, if you just want to read a great business book, check out this list.

Photo credit: Wyoming_Jackrabbit via photopin cc