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The Listening Advisor: Winning Loyal Clients Through Authentic Human Connection
John Gatewood’s The Listening Advisor is a practical communication book written specifically for financial advisors, but its central idea reaches well beyond wealth management. Gatewood argues that technical expertise only becomes useful when an advisor first understands the person sitting across the table. Drawing on more than four decades in financial services, he builds the book around a simple sequence: understand before advising, connect before presenting, and listen well enough that what you eventually say actually matters. His personal stories give that message credibility, especially when he describes meetings he mishandled, clients he misunderstood, and lessons he learned from his father’s ability to make complicated financial ideas understandable. The result feels less like a lecture on communication and more like an experienced advisor explaining what he wishes he’d learned much earlier in his career.
The book works particularly well because Gatewood breaks listening into specific behaviors. The principles section explores ideas such as respecting the client’s sense of time, noticing questions that haven’t been asked, choosing questions over premature answers, addressing uncomfortable subjects, simplifying explanations, and recognizing the emotions behind financial decisions. The practice section then becomes even more concrete, covering presence, interruptions, body language, open-ended questions, judgment, and silence. Gatewood repeatedly asks readers to notice the small moments that change a conversation, such as a glance at a watch, a furrowed brow, a spouse who suddenly stops talking, or the temptation to finish someone’s sentence. His examples make those moments easy to recognize in your own behavior, and the reflection exercises at the end of chapters turn the reading into something closer to coaching than passive instruction.
Gatewood also gives the book a timely frame by asking what human advisors can contribute as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of handling analysis, research, planning, and routine communication. His answer is that an advisor’s value increasingly comes from judgment, presence, empathy, courage, and the ability to accompany another person through uncertainty. That theme runs through the whole book, but it’s most persuasive when connected to ordinary client interactions. A widow who’s afraid to make a decision, a couple with different priorities, or a client embarrassed by a financial mistake needs more than information. They need someone who’ll listen without rushing, clarify instead of assume, and respond without making them feel judged. Gatewood keeps returning to those human moments, which gives the book a strong sense of purpose even as individual principles reinforce one another throughout the chapters.
I’d recommend The Listening Advisor to financial advisors who already know the technical side of their profession and want to become noticeably better in the room with clients. New advisors will appreciate having a communication playbook early in their careers, while experienced advisors may get even more from the book because they’ll recognize habits they’ve developed without realizing it. The appendices are especially useful for anyone who wants to put the ideas into practice immediately. Gatewood distills the book into a five-step listening framework, a process for working through client objections, and a structure for opening, conducting, and closing meetings with more intention. Those tools make this a book worth returning to after the first read, particularly before an important client conversation or when a meeting hasn’t gone as well as expected. It’s ultimately a book about becoming more attentive to people, and financial advisors who believe relationships are part of the real work, not merely a route to the work, will probably appreciate it most.
Pages: 284 | ASIN : B0HCK58HYB
Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation
Do Your Thing: Lessons from Banking’s Biggest Digital Transformation, by Ralph Hamers, is a book on business leadership, digital transformation, and banking management built around the reinvention of ING after the global financial crisis. Hamers takes readers from the bank’s years of government support, forced restructuring, layoffs, and battered employee confidence into the much more ambitious project of turning ING into a digital-first, customer-centered organization. What gives the story its energy is the scale of the undertaking as Hamers aspired to get tens of thousands of people across multiple countries to agree on what ING existed to do, how it would compete, how its leaders should behave, and what customers should actually experience.
The book’s central argument is that transformation comes from connecting all of those pieces and then staying remarkably consistent about them. That makes the ING story useful well beyond banking. Anyone interested in organizational change, business strategy, corporate culture, or transformation leadership will recognize the problem Hamers keeps returning to: having a vision is much easier than getting an enormous organization to live it every day.
The strongest parts of the book are where that big idea gets concrete. Hamers walks through the creation of the Think Forward strategy, ING’s purpose of “empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business,” the Orange Code that defined expected behaviors, and the shift from a product-centered bank to a customer-centered one. He is adept at showing how seemingly separate choices reinforced each other. Customer centricity led to simpler products and better digital experiences. The “Do Your Thing” brand gives an outward expression to ideas the organization had already spent years putting into practice. The progression Hamers presents makes this digital banking transformation story unusually satisfying because readers can watch strategy travel all the way from a CEO’s thinking to technology, organizational structure, office design, employee behavior, and finally the public-facing brand.
Hamers also makes the book feel personal enough to keep the management material from turning into a stack of frameworks. His recurring emphasis on consistency is persuasive because the later chapters show what consistency looks like when the decisions become harder. The discussion of sustainability and ING’s Terra Approach, for example, extends the book’s purpose-driven leadership argument into lending decisions, climate commitments, stakeholder expectations, and the messy reality of societal change. Hamers is willing to discuss adjustments, resistance, imperfect execution, and the tension between empowerment and control, which gives the change management and executive leadership lessons some welcome texture. His voice is confident and occasionally repetitive, especially when returning to purpose, customers, and consistency, but that repetition also mirrors his leadership philosophy: if an idea matters enough to organize a company around, people are going to need to hear it more than once.
The final section brings the ING experience into the age of artificial intelligence, and that turns out to be a natural destination for the book rather than an add-on. Hamers’ most useful contribution is the idea that leaders don’t need perfect foresight so much as a clear direction and an organization capable of moving, learning, and adjusting without losing its purpose. By the end, ING’s transformation feels less like a banking case study than a working example of how strategy becomes real through thousands of linked choices. For executives, transformation leaders, and readers interested in digital strategy, customer experience, agile organizations, corporate purpose, and the future of leadership, there’s a lot here worth carrying into the next big change.
Pages: 318 | ISBN : 978-1544552033
Innovation Portfolio Management: Linking Strategy to Execution
Innovation Portfolio Management, by Noel Sobelman, is a practical business management book about turning innovation from a collection of promising projects into a coordinated enterprise capability. Sobelman treats innovation portfolio management as the link between strategy, investment decisions, resource allocation, and day-to-day execution. Drawing on decades of work with global organizations, he explains why companies often struggle to translate ambitious growth plans into a pipeline that can realistically deliver them. The book’s central idea is persuasive: innovation performs more consistently when leaders manage the whole system, including governance, data, talent, incentives, culture, and execution, rather than concentrating on individual projects.
As an innovation strategy book and corporate leadership guide, it’s impressively thorough. Sobelman begins with a maturity model that moves from ad hoc, static portfolio management to a world-class, continuously adapting discipline. He then walks readers through portfolio scope, investment categories, project evaluation criteria, governance roles, review meetings, resource planning, and allocation frameworks. The progression gives the material a clear logic, and the recurring examples help translate process language into recognizable workplace situations. His discussion of core, adjacent, and transformative innovation is especially useful because it shows how companies can fund current priorities while still creating room for longer-term growth.
The book becomes most engaging when it turns from frameworks to organizational behavior. Sobelman understands that a well-designed portfolio system still depends on leaders who’ll make trade-offs, employees who trust the process, and incentives that support the company’s stated strategy. Chapters on resistance, psychological safety, employee engagement, career paths, and cultural change give this book a welcome human dimension. The later discussions of enterprise software, artificial intelligence, external partnerships, and innovation ecosystems also widen the lens, showing how portfolio management can evolve from periodic reporting into a more responsive decision-making system.
This is a substantial, detail-rich business strategy book best suited to executives, innovation leaders, portfolio managers, R&D teams, and consultants who expect to apply what they read. Its greatest strength is the way it assembles strategy, governance, resource management, culture, and technology into one coherent operating model. The diagrams, diagnostic questions, maturity stages, and implementation guidance make it feel like a working manual that teams could bring into planning sessions and portfolio reviews. Sobelman has produced a grounded and highly usable guide for organizations that want innovation investment to reflect strategic intent and lead to measurable execution.
Pages: 250 | ASIN : B0GXNF3W96
The UnConventional Strategist – Building, Keeping, and Thriving in Your Career
The UnConventional Strategist, by Jay Nakagawa, is a conversational business strategy book, leadership book, and career development guide built around the idea that strategic thinking comes from experience, curiosity, judgment, and action. Nakagawa draws on decades in product management, sales, competitive intelligence, international business, mentoring, music, and family life to show how people learn to recognize patterns and make decisions with incomplete information. The book moves through five broad areas, from becoming strategic and executing a vision to competitive intelligence, professional behavior, legacy, and the long game of a career.
What gives this book its personality is Nakagawa’s willingness to teach through stories. Negotiations in Japan, troubled product launches, awkward customer meetings, corporate politics, raising five children, public speaking, and playing music all become lessons in strategy. His central principles are practical and easy to remember: validate a problem before building a solution, listen for what people aren’t saying, move before the data is perfect, know your strengths, control the pace of a negotiation, and treat competitive intelligence as a way of seeing. He’s especially effective when connecting strategic foresight with execution, since the book repeatedly shows how insight only becomes valuable when someone has the nerve to act on it.
The voice is blunt, funny, and personal, with plenty of pop culture references, sharp metaphors, and candid accounts of mistakes. That style makes a long business leadership book feel more like an extended conversation with an experienced mentor. At times, the repeated slogans and end-of-chapter lesson summaries make points that are already clear, and some of the humor lands more strongly than other bits. Still, the repetition reflects the book’s coaching approach. Nakagawa wants readers to remember the principles when they’re facing a difficult meeting, a stalled decision, a political workplace, or a competitor that’s moving faster than expected.
The book’s most satisfying shift comes in its later chapters, where strategy expands beyond markets and products into time, identity, mentorship, succession, and legacy. Nakagawa presents career strategy as the deliberate management of a whole life, including work, relationships, health, creativity, and the people you help develop. That broader perspective gives the book more emotional weight than a standard competitive intelligence or strategic management guide. The UnConventional Strategist is a practical, spirited field guide for product leaders, executives, strategists, entrepreneurs, and professionals who want to think more clearly, build better judgment, and create a career whose value continues through other people.
Pages: 338 | ASIN : B0GX2RYLM5
The Environment Leaders Create
Helm & Horizon is a yearlong leadership guide organized as a progression from self-leadership to team leadership, strategic thinking, and legacy, treating leadership as a daily practice. Why was this an important book for you to write?
Throughout my career, I spent countless hours reading some of the greatest leadership books out there and listening to leadership podcasts and audiobooks while running along the California coastline. I filled notebooks with ideas from military leaders, historians, philosophers, psychologists, coaches, and business executives. Every author offered another piece of the puzzle. Over time, I noticed the principles were remarkably consistent. The source didn’t matter. Marcus Aurelius, Admiral Chester Nimitz, John Maxwell, Admiral Arleigh Burke, Sun Tzu, Simon Sinek, to Brené Brown- they all pointed toward the same timeless truths about leadership.
I wanted to bring those ideas together in one place and make them practical. So instead of writing another leadership framework, my goal was to create a guide that distilled the best ideas into something people could apply every single day. The examples come from U.S. naval case studies because that’s the world I know best, but the principles are universal. Trust, humility, accountability, resilience, communication, and service aren’t military concepts. They’re human ones. My hope is that a teacher, business owner, healthcare professional, coach, parent, or military leader can all open the same page and find something meaningful.
The book emphasizes that leadership is a daily habit rather than something earned with rank or position. When did that philosophy first become important to you?
I don’t think there was one defining moment, but I will say that one experience shaped my leadership philosophy more than any other.
During my first tour as a surface warfare officer, my ship went through six commanding officers in less than three years. Some departures were routine, while others followed highly publicized incidents. Every transition brought a different leadership style, different priorities, and a different command climate. As a junior officer, I watched firsthand how dramatically one leader could influence the morale, trust, and effectiveness of an entire crew.
Then I transferred to my next ship, and the contrast couldn’t have been greater. We had a commanding officer who deliberately pushed decision-making down to the lowest levels and encouraged initiative instead of demanding compliance. People weren’t afraid to speak up, solve problems, or take responsibility because they knew they were trusted to do so. The culture was fundamentally different, and so were the results.
Experiencing those two commands back-to-back completely changed how I viewed leadership. I realized that leadership is reflected in the environment leaders create and the way they bring out the best in the people around them. Every conversation, every decision, and every action either strengthens trust or weakens it. That comparison stayed with me throughout the rest of my career, and it became one of the central ideas behind Helm & Horizon. Leadership isn’t a rank, title, or position. It’s a mindset. It’s the accumulation of hundreds of ordinary decisions that shape a culture, influence people, and ultimately define the legacy we leave behind.
Writing 366 entries is an enormous undertaking. How did you keep each day’s lesson fresh while maintaining a consistent voice throughout the book?
There were definitely days when I wondered if I’d ever reach Day 366. Fortunately, I wasn’t starting with a blank sheet of paper. For several years I’d been reading, highlighting, taking notes, and collecting ideas from leadership books that changed the way I thought about leading people.
The challenge was deciding what deserved to be included. Every principle had to earn its place. I kept asking myself two questions. Is this timeless? Can someone put this into practice tomorrow? The consistent voice came from looking at every lesson through the same lens. Every entry had to help someone become a better leader today. That’s why each day follows the same format. A leadership principle. A practical application. Two actions to put into practice. One final thought to carry forward.
In the military, we have a term called BLUF, which stands for Bottom Line Up Front. That’s what I wanted Helm & Horizon to be. A collection of concise, accessible leadership principles that deliver value quickly, especially when your time to read is limited.
Although the book is written for Sailors, many of the principles seem applicable beyond the military. What do you think civilian leaders can take away from Helm & Horizon?
One of the most rewarding parts of publishing Helm & Horizon has been discovering who is reading it. Although I wrote it through the lens of a Navy Sailor, I never intended it to be just a military leadership book. Leadership is ultimately about people, and people face many of the same challenges no matter where they work. That’s been reinforced by the feedback I’ve received.
Physicians have shared that they’re giving the book to every new medical resident joining their program. Financial executives have told me they’re using it to develop leadership within their organizations. I’ve used it myself to lead discussions with an eighth-grade classroom, where the conversations quickly moved beyond the Navy and into character, teamwork, and personal responsibility. Today, those same principles form the basis of a professional leadership course I’m developing with the University of Michigan, with Helm & Horizon as its primary resource.
Experiences like those have been incredibly rewarding because they confirm something I believed from the beginning. The stories may come from ships, deployments, and naval history, but the lessons don’t belong to the military. A school principal may never command a destroyer, and a physician may never stand watch on the bridge, but both are responsible for earning trust, developing teams, making difficult decisions, and creating a culture where people can succeed.
If Helm & Horizon helps readers recognize that leadership isn’t defined by a title or profession, but by the choices they make every day and the impact they have on others, then I’ve accomplished exactly what I set out to do.
Author Links: GoodReads | LinkedIn | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Every day is an opportunity to lead. Helm & Horizon: Daily Leadership Principles for the Motivated Sailor is a 365-day leadership guide built for serious professionals committed to continuous growth. Designed for leaders balancing demanding schedules, each concise daily entry delivers practical wisdom drawn from proven leadership works, naval history, and real-world operational experience.
Recognized as the official partner publication of DODReads, a leading platform dedicated to military leadership, professional reading, and lifelong learning, Helm & Horizon stands alongside works trusted by service members, veterans, and defense professionals seeking disciplined leadership development.
This comprehensive year-long guide draws from over fifty of the most influential leadership books ever written. It integrates insights from best-selling authors such as Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership), Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way), L. David Marquet (Turn the Ship Around!), and Sun Tzu (The Art of War), alongside naval case studies featuring leaders like Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, and Medal of Honor recipient Chief Boatswain’s Mate James E. Williams. From Viktor Frankl’s reflections on meaning under hardship (Man’s Search for Meaning) to Angela Duckworth’s research on perseverance (Grit), the book connects timeless principles to the demands of leadership under pressure.
Each of the 365 daily entries teaches a focused leadership principle with immediately applicable insight.
You will learn how to:
• Take ownership and build a culture of accountability
• Make disciplined decisions in high-pressure environments
• Communicate with clarity and moral authority
• Inspire sustained performance through standards and example
• Lead ethically when stakes are high
• Develop cohesive teams capable of operating independently
Read one page a day. Reflect. Apply. Repeat. Over time, you will build the habits, judgment, and professional character required of leaders entrusted with real responsibility.
Whether at sea, in business, or within your community, Helm & Horizon provides a structured framework for daily leadership development.
The leadership journey starts with you.
Lead with Purpose. Take the Helm. Keep Your Eyes on the Horizon.
Helm & Horizon: Leadership Principles for the Motivated Sailor
Helm & Horizon: Daily Leadership Principles for the Motivated Sailor by Steven-Paul Lapid is a yearlong leadership guide built around 366 short daily readings. Each entry draws a principle from an established leadership, history, psychology, business, or military book, then translates it into the language and routines of naval service. The consistent format includes a core principle, a story or operational example, two practical actions under “Take the Helm,” and a closing reflection called “Eyes on the Horizon.” Organized as a progression from self-leadership to team leadership, strategic thinking, and legacy, the book treats leadership as a daily practice rather than an achievement tied to rank.
Lapid’s strongest contribution is his ability to connect broad leadership ideas to situations a Sailor can picture immediately. Concepts such as accountability, humility, emotional intelligence, decentralized command, and moral courage are placed aboard ships, inside watch teams, and amid maintenance, training, personnel problems, and emergencies. Naval history gives the lessons additional weight, with examples ranging from Chester Nimitz and James Stockdale to the crews of the USS Fitzgerald, USS Forrestal, and USS Thresher. Because the readings are brief and concrete, they could work well before quarters, during a Sailor 360 discussion, or as prompts for a division’s professional development.
The book’s steady structure is also central to the experience. Its repetition reinforces the argument that character is formed through habits, though readers moving straight through all 366 entries may notice familiar themes and historical figures returning often. That rhythm makes more sense when the book is used as intended, one reading at a time, with room to reflect and apply the lesson. Lapid writes with conviction and a clear affection for naval service, and his recurring nautical language gives the collection a unified voice. The result feels less like a conventional book to finish and more like a leadership companion to keep nearby, mark up, discuss, and revisit.
This book will be most appreciated by active-duty Sailors, especially junior officers, chiefs, petty officers, and emerging leaders who want practical material they can use with their teams. Veterans, military families, ROTC and academy students, and civilian managers who enjoy service-based leadership lessons should also find value in it. Readers looking for an intensive academic study of leadership will probably use it differently, but anyone who benefits from brief daily prompts, memorable examples, and clear actions will find plenty to carry into the next watch. It’s particularly well suited to leaders who believe professional growth happens through small, repeated choices and who want a structured way to turn that belief into practice.
Pages: 770 | ASIN : B0GHZL6H9N
Leaders of Influence
Leaders of Influence is a multi-author leadership anthology that examines influence as a daily practice grounded in conduct, judgment, and responsibility. Its central proposition, “Leadership is influence with responsibility,” gives the collection a clear ethical foundation. Rather than treating influence as visibility or personal magnetism, the contributors explore how leaders shape expectations, decisions, culture, and performance through repeated actions. The result is a professionally focused book for executives, business owners, advisors, and emerging leaders who want to understand how their behaviour affects the systems around them.
The book’s strongest quality is the range of perspectives gathered around that central idea. Pollyanna Lenkic considers self-awareness, accountability, emotional maturity, and the ways leaders can unintentionally create dependency. W Daniel Cox III connects influence with board-level data governance, showing that credible leadership depends on trustworthy information and clearly assigned ownership. Kala Philip explores leadership as communication at scale, Luke Moroney presents influence as something built through consistent presence over time, and Anton Guinea brings the collection together through five dimensions that connect intention with integrity. Lauren Clemett examines visible credibility, professional positioning, and the courage required to become known for meaningful expertise. Les Moir’s discussion of the wolf adds a memorable framework for composure, standards, protection, and capability-building.
Although the contributors use different experiences and models, the essays remain connected by an emphasis on consistency. One of the book’s most useful observations is that “Influence is not only what we say. It is what our repeated behaviour teaches others to expect.” Case studies, personal accounts, diagnostic questions, and short exercises help translate that principle into workplace practice. Readers are repeatedly asked to consider what their teams do in their absence, how they behave under pressure, whether their stated values appear in their decisions, and whether their leadership develops ownership or dependence. These questions give the book substance and make it suitable for individual reflection, coaching conversations, and leadership-development programs.
The collection’s direct, accessible style supports its practical purpose. Its strongest chapters combine personal vulnerability with a disciplined explanation of how behaviour becomes culture, while its visual quotations and concise prompts make important ideas easy to revisit. Some themes recur across the contributors, particularly authenticity, self-awareness, credibility, and intentional action, but that repetition also reinforces the book’s argument that influence is cumulative. Leaders of Influence is a thoughtful and application-oriented examination of how people earn trust, communicate standards, strengthen capability, and create an impact that continues long after they’ve left the room.
Pages: 230 | ASIN : B0GX2WN4D4
The Doubt Loop: Turning Founder Doubt Into a Competitive Advantage
The Doubt Loop is Adam Crawshaw’s candid, founder-minded guide to turning self-doubt from an inner saboteur into a working discipline. Built around the simple rhythm of noticing fear, naming it, and converting it into action, the book moves from pre-launch soul-searching to early-stage experiments and, finally, to the stranger anxieties of success. Crawshaw threads his own story through the advice, from childhood moments of exposed vulnerability to the brutal polish of finance and investing, then to Assembly’s $1.4 billion outcome, which, tellingly, doesn’t cure him of doubt at all. The result is part memoir, part operating manual, and part emotional x-ray of entrepreneurship.
The book is most compelling when Crawshaw lets the polished founder mask slip. The scene where he expects the sale of Assembly to taste like arrival, only for the champagne moment to curdle into “battery acid,” stayed with me because it captures something business books often sand down: achievement can be loud outside and eerily hollow inside. His recollection of drinking milk instead of coffee during an all-nighter, or nursing the embarrassment of a basketball game gone wrong, gives the book a lived-in tenderness beneath its swagger. The writing is energetic, metaphor-happy, and sometimes deliberately rowdy, but its best passages have an honest pulse. Crawshaw knows how to make a framework feel less like a laminated consultant tool and more like something scribbled in a notebook after a very bad night.
The ideas themselves are strongest when they refuse easy comfort. I appreciated the bluntness of the motive matrix, especially the insistence that Wealth, Control, Passion, and Ego cannot all sit serenely at the head of the table. That’s not just useful advice, it’s emotionally clarifying. The belief ladder, the tide framework, the “I don’t mean to sh*t on your baby” anecdote, and the later ROSE test all work because they translate vague anxiety into sharper questions. The book’s density of metaphors and founder examples can feel almost over-stuffed. Still, I’d rather have a book with too much nerve than one with too little. Crawshaw’s voice has texture, bite, and a genuine ache behind the jokes.
By the end, what moved me most was that The Doubt Loop doesn’t pretend confidence is the destination. It suggests something wiser and more durable: that doubt can become a form of care, a way of checking the math, protecting the mission, reading the room, and remembering to savor the moments that actually matter. I closed the book feeling that Crawshaw had written not a victory lap, but a field report from someone who’s still listening to the uneasy voice in his head and has learned, imperfectly but seriously, how to answer it. I’d recommend this book to founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, operators, and ambitious professionals who are tired of being told to silence doubt and would rather learn how to put it to work.
Pages: 283 | ASIN : B0GTSJVLN3
