My Top 5 Favorite Books I Think You Should Read
I am obsessed with a book called Excellence Wins, written by Horst Schulze, the man who co-founded the Ritz-Carlton. His book on business and hospitality is so good that I bought a dozen copies for my guys and shared the audiobook with everyone I could.
He wanted to be the best of the best so he set out to build the best hospitality company in the world, and the money followed. His philosophy is built around culture, which fits exactly with how we run our business.
People ask why an auto repair shop owner is reading a book about luxury hotels. And the answer is that leadership is leadership, and the best lessons often come from outside your own industry.
So when someone recently asked me which five books I'd recommend to any leader or entrepreneur, I didn't have to think twice.
1. Good to Great by Jim Collins
If you were to read only one business book in your life, this is the book I’d recommend. Jim Collins, a renowned business researcher, author, and management consultant, and his research team spent years studying why some companies make the leap from good performance to sustained greatness while others stay average. The ideas they share in this book have held up for decades:
You'll learn what great leaders do differently.
You'll make better hires.
You'll learn why great companies never have one big moment.
The best advice I can give is to simply read it.
2. The 5 Levels of Leadership by John Maxwell
I love everything John Maxwell has written, and this one is definitely a stand-out. Maxwell lays out five stages that every leader moves through, and the framework makes it easy to see exactly where you are and what it takes to reach the next stage:
Position: people follow you because they have to.
Permission: people follow you because they want to.
Production: people follow you because of what you have done for the organization.
People development: people follow you because of what you have done for them.
Pinnacle: people follow you because of who you are and what you represent.
And if you want a second book by Maxwell to read after this one, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is also amazing.
3. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
Jocko Willink was a Navy SEAL in Iraq, and this book is about taking full accountability as a leader. I cannot stand it when something goes wrong and people just point fingers. Willink does the opposite.
There's a scene at the beginning of the book I still think about. An operation had gone badly wrong, and when the team gathered afterward, guys started raising their hands to take the blame for their part. Willink stopped them. He said it was his fault. He was the leader, so the responsibility belonged to him.
Once I read that, the rest of the book made sense. When a leader owns everything in their world, excuses disappear and problems actually get solved.
4. Excellence Wins by Horst Schulze
This is the book I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Schulze built the Ritz-Carlton on the belief that service excellence is a system you can design and teach, and the book is full of practical examples of what that looks like in daily operations. A few ideas really stuck with me:
The Ritz-Carlton motto, "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen," which sets a standard of respect in both directions.
Empowering every employee to solve a guest's problem on the spot, up to $2000, without asking a manager for permission. Schulze trusted his people enough to let them solve problems immediately. That's the kind of trust that builds a great culture.
Treating the customer's experience as the product itself, in any industry.
If you care about culture, hospitality, or how customers should feel when they do business with you, this book is a must-read regardless of what industry you're in.
5. The Art of Winning by Bill Belichick
Belichick, one of the greatest American football head coaches, didn't win for decades by accident. He never showed up on Sundays hoping his team could win the game. He built a system, a formula, paid attention to every little detail happening around him, and adjusted on the fly when circumstances changed.
I loved this book because it aligns with how we run our shop. We take a very systematic approach to everything we do, and when you run on a system, the results become almost predictable. Nothing in business can reach one hundred percent certainty, but a real system can take you as close as you can get.
None of these books were written by someone in the auto industry. They came from a researcher, a leadership teacher, a Navy SEAL, a hotelier, and a football coach. Every one of them made me a better leader and, in turn, better at running my shop.
