Best Systems & Planning Books of 2025

StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath is a national bestseller and an upgraded version of Gallup's online assessment. It helps individuals to identify their strengths and apply them to their personal and professional lives. The book includes a personalized Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide, a customized version of the top five theme report, and 50 Ideas for Action. The book is loaded with hundreds of strategies to apply one's strengths and change the way they perceive themselves and the world around them. The book is highly recommended for individuals looking to identify their strengths and leverage them for success.

Good to Great by Jim Collins is a must-read for business leaders who want to understand how some companies achieve enduring greatness. Collins and his team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained them for at least fifteen years. The book provides insights into the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great. The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. Overall, this book is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to build a great company.

The Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition is a global phenomenon that has sold over 4 million copies and is recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written. The authors, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, challenge traditional thinking about strategy and argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating "blue oceans" - untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. This expanded edition includes updated content, new chapters, and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. Overall, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking to create uncontested market space and make the competition irrelevant.

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson is a practical guide to building and scaling a company's most important resource: its people. The book offers tactical information on crafting foundational documents, strategic planning, hiring, team development, and feedback mechanisms, all of which can be applied to companies of any size and industry. The author provides dozens of pages of worksheets, templates, exercises, and example documents to help company builders create scalable operating systems and lightweight processes. Overall, Scaling People is a detailed roadmap for creating sustainable and scalable companies that are set up for long-term success.

How to Grow Your Small Business by Donald Miller is a must-read for any entrepreneur who wants to take their business to the next level. Miller, a bestselling author, provides a 6-step plan that helps business owners grow their businesses with dependable and predictable results. The book covers key areas such as leadership, marketing, sales, and more. Miller's proven frameworks will help optimize your business and give you the freedom and flexibility to live life on your terms. With Miller's experience in growing his own business, readers can trust that the strategies presented in this book work. This book is highly recommended for anyone looking to grow their small business.

Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy by Patrick Bet-David is a practical guide for entrepreneurs to achieve their professional goals. The book offers a valuable methodology to help entrepreneurs gain clarity, develop strategies, and build the right team based on strong values. The author uses his own experience to provide growth tactics for good times and bad, and insights on power plays and applying leverage. Overall, this book is a must-read for executives, strategists, or entrepreneurs who want to take their businesses to the next level.

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified.  Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health―complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way―one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr is a #1 New York Times Bestseller that introduces the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) goal-setting system, which has helped tech companies like Google achieve explosive growth. Doerr shares his experience of OKRs and how it can be applied to any organization. The book provides first-person behind-the-scenes case studies of companies that have implemented OKRs, including Google, Intel, and the Gates Foundation. The benefits of using OKRs are profound, including a focus on important work, fostering coordination, and boosting retention. Overall, Measure What Matters is an excellent resource for anyone looking to improve their business strategy.

Brilliant distillations of the strategies of war—and the subtle social game of everyday life—by the bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature Robert Greene’s groundbreaking guides, The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and Mastery, espouse profound, timeless lessons from the events of history to help readers vanquish an enemy, ensnare an unsuspecting victim, or become the greatest in your field. In The 33 Strategies of War, Greene has crafted an important addition to this ruthless and unique series.. Spanning world civilizations, synthesizing dozens of political, philosophical, and religious texts and thousands of years of violent conflict, The 33 Strategies of War is the I-Ching of conflict, the contemporary companion to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.. Abundantly illustrated with examples from history, including the folly and genius of everyone from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher, Shaka the Zulu to Lord Nelson, Hannibal to Ulysses S. Grant, as well as movie moguls, Samurai swordsmen, and diplomats, each of the thirty-three chapters outlines a strategy that will help you win life’s wars. Learn the offensive strategies that require you to maintain the initiative and negotiate from a position of strength, or the defensive strategies designed to help you respond to dangerous situations and avoid unwinnable wars. The great warriors of battlefields and drawing rooms alike demonstrate prudence, agility, balance, and calm, and a keen understanding that the rational, resourceful, and intuitive always defeat the panicked, the uncreative, and the stupid. An indispensable book, The 33 Strategies of War provides all the psychological ammunition you need to overcome patterns of failure and forever gain the upper hand.

The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure is a must-read for those determined to achieve their business dreams. The book introduces the principle of "Massive Action," which guarantees individuals and companies to realize their goals and dreams. The author demonstrates how to move into making the 10X Rule a discipline, offering the exact formula to solve problems and exceed targets. The book is a powerful tool to help readers defy mediocrity and achieve extreme success. Overall, The 10X Rule is a highly motivating and unique read in the business motivation and self-improvement genre.