Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedRecommends Conscious Business. Recommends Thinking in Systems. Recommends The Effective Executive.
28 Dec 2025 Lenny's Podcast 10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling)
“Okay. Two or three books. You give me a heads-up on this. So one book is Conscious Business. I don't have Conscious Business in front of me because it's actually at the office because we have Conscious Business Reading Club at Rippling. And every member of my current, my product leadership team is going through this right now, Conscious Business, Fred Kofman. It's been used in many businesses, LinkedIn most notably, as a framework for thinking about ... effectively, it's a user manual for human beings. So if you are a leader, a manager, an executive, whatever, particularly younger people in their 20s and 30s who are just sort of getting the hang of being a CEO or a product leader for the first time, this book is absolute fucking gold. It was recommended to me by Bryan Schreier at Sequoia when he was on my board at my previous company. I took way too long to take him up on the advice, wished I had read it sooner. Highly recommend Conscious Business. Changes your life. Number two, Thinking in Systems, Donna Meadows. I always mispronounce her name, Donella Meadows. She died partway through writing this manuscript. Her fellow professors picked it up and finished it for her. It is the best generic framework for thinking about how systems work. You will extrapolate from this book to every aspect of your life after you read it. And then the third is classic 1960s, The Effective Executive. It's an anachronism. It uses weird pronouns for the secretary and the executive. I'll let you guess which ones. But the book itself is so chock-full of simple enduring advice on how to be effective at leading teams. And the good shit is the stuff that's been in print for 70 years, and that's one of them.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Matt MacInnis
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 28 Dec 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? Okay. Two or three books. You give me a heads-up on this. So one book is Conscious Business. I don't have Conscious Business in front of me because it's actually at the office because we have Conscious Business Reading Club at Rippling. And every member of my current, my product leadership team is going through this right now, Conscious Business, Fred Kofman. It's been used in many businesses, LinkedIn most notably, as a framework for thinking about ... effectively, it's a user manual for human beings. So if you are a leader, a manager, an executive, whatever, particularly younger people in their 20s and 30s who are just sort of getting the hang of being a CEO or a product leader for the first time, this book is absolute fucking gold. It was recommended to me by Bryan Schreier at Sequoia when he was on my board at my previous company. I took way too long to take him up on the advice, wished I had read it sooner. Highly recommend Conscious Business. Changes your life. Number two, Thinking in Systems, Donna Meadows. I always mispronounce her name, Donella Meadows. She died partway through writing this manuscript. Her fellow professors picked it up and finished it for her. It is the best generic framework for thinking about how systems work. You will extrapolate from this book to every aspect of your life after you read it. And then the third is classic 1960s, The Effective Executive. It's an anachronism. It uses weird pronouns for the secretary and the executive. I'll let you guess which ones. But the book itself is so chock-full of simple enduring advice on how to be effective at leading teams. And the good shit is the stuff that's been in print for 70 years, and that's one of them. Beautiful. I love the first one is you don't have it because you're using it with your team constantly. You mentioned at one point before we started recording, you have eight copies of that book that you just give out to everyone.…
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