The Great CEO Within
Matt Mochary coaches the CEOs of many of the fastest-scaling technology companies in Silicon Valley. With The Great CEO Within, he shares his highly effective leadership and business-operating tools with any CEO or manager in the world. Learn how to efficiently scale your business from startup to corporation by implementing a system of accountability, effective problem-solving, and transparent feedback. Becoming a great CEO requires training. For a founding CEO, there is precious little time to complete that training, especially at the helm of a rapidly growing company. Now you have the guidance you need in one book.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
14mentions
10people
2018–2025years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Some of the business books that I always keep within easy reach of my desk:
- High output management
- The hard thing about hard things
- The Great CEO Within
- Who - a method for hiring
(I've also bought and given away multiple copies of each of these books.)
- Advice to Founders and CEOs
- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)
Finance
- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)
Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)
- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)
Legal
- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)
Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)
- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore) - Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove) - Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh) - The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) - Good to Great (Jim Collins) - Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin) - Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman) - Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)
Pricing
- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan) - Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)
Startup Phase
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
Management/Leadership
- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) - Managing Humans (Michael Lopp) - The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp) - High Output Management (Andy Grove) - Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker) - Essentials: Management (First Round Capital) - The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo) - The Powell Principles (Oren Harari) - Radical Candor (Kim Scott) - Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda) - Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation) - Principles (Ray Dalio)
COO/Succession Planning
- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)
People Performance/HR/Culture
- Powerful (Patty McCord) - No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer) - Netflix culture deck - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) - Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock) - It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried) - The Culture Map (Erin Meyer) - The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle) - Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)
Purpose, Passion, and Self
- Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)
Fundraising/VC
- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson) - Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks) - The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani) - Done Deals (Udayan Gupta) - The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby) - VC (Tom Nicholas)
Board
- Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas) - Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)
M&A
- Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter - Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter
Marketing
- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery) - Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout) - Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins) - Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) - Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler) - Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy) - Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)
Psychology
- Influence (Robert Cialdini)
Negotiation
First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order
- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke) - Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury) - Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) - The Bald Truth (David Falk)
Self
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)
Design and UX
- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)
AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)
- Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....
Growth (Data Science, etc.)
- Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)
Graph Theory
Product
- Inspired (Marty Cagan) - Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)
Customer Loyalty/Customer Success
- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)
Finding a Startup Job
- Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)
CIO as ICP
- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller) - Be the Business (Martha Heller)
Stories
- Made in America (Sam Walton) - Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) - The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank) - Hard Drive (James Wallace) - Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) - Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull) - The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) - Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner) - Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik) - Idea Man (Paul Allen) - Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)
- I suggest buy these gems and read them (roughly) in this order, take it seriously - take notes.
// Mindset (Important)
- Think and Grow Rich https://a.co/d/fMmWnrI (listen to Earn Nightingale's "The Strangest Secret" daily while reading it - https://open.spotify.com/album/0bg1C7BwYZq5vXFpJOhZFM?si=wAB...; listen to everything else he's done: https://open.spotify.com/artist/4gyPmRdEnJ6GVibKuQekoF?si=YD...)
^^ Take this one seriously, take notes, and when he says do something - do it, trust the system.
- Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders https://a.co/d/8H4AsQg
// Startup & Business
- The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building https://a.co/d/daElAvL (MUST READ - extremely actionable)
- A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations https://a.co/d/d7LljeV
// Writing & Speaking
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction https://a.co/d/3Sb7vG4
- Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds https://a.co/d/gd0LJuU
- The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition https://a.co/d/bFYFQyo
// Sales
- Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook https://a.co/d/gM1yZt7
- The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation https://a.co/d/1FPKfmy
- Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal https://a.co/d/86WRDtR
--
Best of luck of your journey.
- It's been up for years. If you are super worried, I suggest buying his book which is ~90% of this in printed form. Called The Great CEO Within.
- OKRs transformed how our I run my business - I cannot recommend them highly enough.
Read The Great CEO Within for a practical guide on how to implement them, including how to manage meetings that manage and monitor OKRs.
- No because I didn't learn how to start a sustainable business from a book or online resource unfortunately.
It was more a case of trying something, seeing if it worked, keeping it if it did and stopping it if it didn't. Aka trial and error.
Problem with trial and error is that unless you're naturally gifted at running a business (I'm not) or lucky (I'm not) it takes a long time to learn all the lessons you need to learn to make a successful business.
The best shortcut is a good mentor...but those are hard to find.
Edit: Having said that, Reddit has a lot of smart people on it that are able to provide sensible guidance for specific business problems.
Also: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-CEO-Within-Tactical-Building-... <-- this was a great framework for running various areas of a business. Wish I had stumbled across it sooner than this year.
