Lead Beyond Design: 10 Unconventional Books Every Design Leader Needs

Go from designer to design leader with these essential reads

Photo by Maxim Ilyahov on Unsplash

Hey everyone, today, I’m going to give you my thoughts on a few books on leadership and actually, some of them are going to be out-of-the-box kind of books. So let’s get started.

Book №1

The first book is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It’s actually one of my favorite books ever. It’s about the inner battle, the resistance you face when you need to do something, especially creative effort, or you want to write a blog post or create a video, etc.

It’s really how to go through those inner creative battles and just mash through it and the recipe to actually overcoming is super simple, showing up and doing the work regardless of how you feel.

Why is this so good for design leaders?

It’s because it doesn’t matter the seniority you are or what type of work you’re going to do, like your creative capability and the things you could be doing are simply going to expand and you are going to have even more problems or issues to deal with and even more ideas to overcome and actually make it happen.

Prioritization is going to be a big, massive factor in that, and figuring out how to prioritize things is going to be very important; but also being able to just show up and do the things which, you know, you might just procrastinate on with something else or simply there is some sort of inner resistance. So it doesn’t matter what seniority you are, you’re going to deal with resistance sooner or later.

Book №2

The next one is the Science of Storytelling by Will Storr. This is a super important read for any design leader because everything we do is going to be story-bound or narrative-bound. The more uncertain things are, the more strategic things are, the more they need the reinforcement of vision and narratives to actually for people to be able to buy in and, you know, go with it and contribute.

So for team managers and leaders of any caliber, storytelling is one of the most important parts. You cannot tell bad stories because people are just not going to…