--- title: 3 Books on Leadership That Changed Lives, and What They Can Change in Yours description: "Meditations, How to Win Friends and Influence People and Man's Search for Meaning: the stories behind three life-changing leadership books." author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-11-08T11:32:12.189Z updated: 2026-11-08T11:32:12.206Z canonical: https://www.richmanmagazine.com/article/3-books-on-leadership-that-changed-lives-and-what-they-can-change-in-yours image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-13923801.webp categories: Books content_type: Guide publication: Rich Man Magazine schema_type: Article --- Thousands of leadership books come out every year, and most are forgotten within a season. A few last for generations, passed from parent to child and from mentor to protégé, and read again in every crisis. The three below were written in very different worlds: a Roman military camp, a New York evening class and a Nazi concentration camp. Each one has changed the lives of millions of readers, and each still has something to teach you about leading other people, starting with yourself. With seven weeks left of the year, any one of them would make a fine companion for the long evenings, or a gift for someone you would like to see grow. ## Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: The Emperor Who Wrote Only for Himself **Written:** around AD 170 to 180. **Best for:** leading yourself under pressure. Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire from AD 161 to 180, the most powerful man in the known world. He spent much of his reign on military campaigns along the Danube frontier, while a devastating plague swept the empire. At night, he wrote notes to himself in Greek. He never meant anyone else to read them. The notebook has no title from his own hand, and scholars often call it, simply, 'To Himself'. That is what makes it extraordinary. You are not reading a leader's public image. You are reading a man reminding himself, again and again, to be patient, honest and fair while everything around him pulled the other way. The book has travelled a long way since. Generals, presidents and chief executives keep it on their desks. The US Marine general James Mattis has said he carried a copy with him on deployments. **Three lessons for you:** - **Focus on what you control.** Marcus returns again and again to the Stoic idea that you cannot control events or other people, only your own judgements and actions. Most of the stress of leadership comes from fighting the first category. - **Expect difficult people, and forgive them in advance.** In one famous passage, he prepares himself each morning to meet people who will be ungrateful, rude or dishonest, and reminds himself that they act from ignorance and that he is made to work with them, not against them. - **Remember that it all passes.** He reminds himself often that fame, wealth and even emperors fade. It is not a gloomy thought. It frees you to do the right thing rather than the impressive one. **Read it if:** you lead in a crisis, or you find yourself losing your temper with people you are supposed to inspire. Read a page a night, as he wrote it. ## How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie: The Handbook That Built Confidence **Published:** 1936. **Best for:** leading through people rather than over them. Dale Carnegie was born Dale Carnagey, a farm boy from Missouri who sold bacon and soap before he found his calling teaching public speaking at evening classes in New York. He changed the spelling of his surname to match the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, a name that opened doors. His book grew out of the material he used in his courses, and it has sold more than 30 million copies. Its most famous student never needed the book to make money, but needed the course to find his voice. As a young man, Warren Buffett was so frightened of speaking in public that he said it made him feel physically ill. He enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course in Omaha and received his certificate in January 1952. He has said that he keeps that certificate on his office wall, not his university degrees. **Three lessons for you:** - **Stop criticising, condemning and complaining.** Carnegie's first principle sounds simple, and it is the hardest. Criticism puts people on the defensive and makes them justify themselves. It rarely changes behaviour. - **Use people's names, and remember them.** Carnegie believed that a person's own name is, to them, the most important sound in any language. Remembering it shows them they matter to you. - **Talk about what the other person wants.** People act for their own reasons, not yours. Carnegie's advice is to understand what someone needs before you ask them for anything. Critics have called some of its techniques manipulative, and the book's title has not aged well. Read it with that in mind. The core of it, though, is genuine interest in other people, and that never goes out of date. **Read it if:** you are technically brilliant but people do not follow you, or you have just been promoted to manage the colleagues who used to be your peers. ## Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: Leadership at Its Deepest **Published:** 1946, in German. **Best for:** finding purpose, and helping others find theirs. Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist who survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and camps attached to Dachau. His parents, his brother and his wife died in the Holocaust. After the war, he wrote the first part of this book, an account of life in the camps, in a matter of days. What he observed there became the foundation of his work. The prisoners most likely to survive, he noticed, were often not the strongest but those who held on to a reason to live: a person waiting for them, work left unfinished, a purpose they had not yet fulfilled. He borrowed a line from Nietzsche to sum it up: if you have a why to live for, you can bear almost any how. The book has sold more than 16 million copies in more than 50 languages. In a 1991 survey for the Library of Congress, readers named it one of the ten most influential books in America. **Three lessons for you:** - **Your attitude is the one freedom nobody can take.** Frankl believed that even when everything else is stripped away, you keep the freedom to choose how you respond. Leaders who model that choice steady everyone around them. - **Give people a why, not just a what.** Teams endure long hours, setbacks and change far better when they understand what their effort is for. Your most important job as a leader may be to make the purpose visible. - **Meaning comes from three places.** Frankl saw meaning in the work you do, in the people you love and in the courage you show when suffering cannot be avoided. One a-ha for book lovers: the line most often quoted from Frankl, about a space between stimulus and response in which lies our freedom, does not appear in this book. It was popularised by others and attributed to him, and its true origin is uncertain. The real book is better than the quote. **Read it if:** you lead people through loss, change or hardship, or you have lost your own sense of why. ## What the Three Books Share Across Nearly Two Thousand Years An emperor, a salesman and a prisoner reached the same conclusion. Leadership starts inside you, with the judgements you make, the attitude you choose and the purpose you hold on to. Only then does it reach other people, through patience, genuine interest and a reason worth following. Start with whichever book matches the leader you need to be next year. If you are leading through a crisis, open Marcus Aurelius. If you are leading new people, start with Carnegie. If you are leading through loss or change, begin with Frankl. All three are short enough to finish before Christmas, and good enough to reread for the rest of your life.