Want To Be A Better Marketing Leader? Read These Three Books

I try to mix up what I read, bouncing between subjects and genres. Honestly, I don’t want to always read professional development or business-y books all the time. I’ve been at work all day and sometimes reading is the best escape I can get outside of a Netflix binge.

That said, there are three books that I would recommend to anyone looking to be a marketing leader. I read all three of these in the last few months and think they all speak to different areas of leadership quite well. They are also all written by actual marketing leaders. So…you know…that’s also helpful.

Those books are….

Each one brings a unique perspective to the table and taught me a lot. If I’m not a better marketing leader from what I learned here, it’s my own fault. I’ll break down why these are all must-reads for any rising leader.

What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say: Life Lessons for Any Career

While this post (and my own career) is marketing focused, this book would be applicable to anyone starting out in any career. It’s one of the few that I’ll make my kids read when they graduate high school and have to start making real decisions.

Adam’s book is full of small nuggets of wisdom and pieces of advice he’s picked up along the way. He’s not someone who pontificates one reality in a book but lives another one. It’s authentic and you can see Adam’s personality all through the pages. It also helps that it’s genuinely funny and the chapters all stand alone. He talks about how to build solid relationships with people, taking risks on yourself and how you can learn something from about any situation.

All-around, it was a really encouraging book for anyone looking to grow in…well…most anything.

The Great Team Turnaround: Building A Great Internal Team Culture

For someone who is a serial entrepreneur, Jeff Hilimire writes about the best series of books on intrapreneurship I have ever run across. All of the books in his Turnaround series of books have been excellent primers on how to best organize the culture and effectiveness of internal product or marketing teams. They have all given me ideas for how I could do something different with my own teams.

In this book, it follows a (fictional) product team for a SaaS company that is in a bit of a rut. They have a talented leader for that project but things aren’t moving forward well. Ultimately, the team develops their own PVTV (purpose, vision, tenants, values) specific to their projects that also support the larger organization’s PVTV.

At the end of the day, it’s like that specific product team created their own small culture within the larger company culture. It’s a smart way to approach change management. When you are trying to innovate in a large machine of a company, it can feel a bit helpless. The story in this book shows how you could help drive a mission with your own small team that could ultimately have a ripple effect within the larger organization. It’s like having your own startup.

This book also had me put another book on my to-read list: The Great Game of Business. It refers to it so much that I feel compelled to read it to connect more dots in my mind.

How To Not Suck At Marketing: Advice on Building a Career

Jeff Perkins started off at a very entry level job at an ad agency. He is now the CEO of ParkMobile here in Atlanta. What does that career path look like?

While the book sounds like it would be a straight marketing how-to book (I mean, the words “How” “To” and “Marketing” are in the title…) it’s more of a memoir on the career challenges Perkins faced. He talks about things that went well, setbacks he faced and how he navigated internal politics of larger organizations.

What Perkins does really well is show how he would increase his value at every company he ever worked at. How he would be hired for one role but raise his hand and help in other areas, growing his portfolio of experience.

As I read this book, saw how hands-on he would get helping quickly solve problems, take on new projects, think through challenges, etc, it really felt like Perkins was reading my journal and giving me personalized advice. It was the exact book I personally needed to read at the moment I read it.

What Would You Add?

There are a LOT of great marketing and career books out there. Which ones should I add to my list? What impact did they make on you?

Drew HawkinsComment