Dropbox’s CEO reads a lot of business books but credits four with making him a better business leader.
Drew Houston cofounded Dropbox in 2007 and has been CEO since.
In the nearly 20 years he’s been at the helm of the cloud storage company, a few books have been instrumental in shaping his approach to business leadership and management, he says.
He was influenced by “a lot of the classics,” he said during an episode of Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast released Wednesday.
One of his favorites is “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker. Though first published in 1966, the book shares timeless insights that have landed it a spot on many business leaders’ must-read lists, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. When Bezos was still CEO, “The Effective Executive” was one of three books he required members of his senior management team to read.
Drucker is widely considered the founder of modern management. “The Effective Executive” covers topics including time management, effective decision-making, and management via objectives and goals.
Houston also loves a few books from Andy Grove, the late former CEO of Intel, specifically “High Output Management” and “Only the Paranoid Survive.” The former imparts lessons from Grove’s tenure at Intel on how to build and run a business. The latter digs into navigating what Grove calls “Strategic Inflection Points,” which he defines as key moments where a business has to make major adjustments or risk becoming obsolete.
Houston says these books taught him about “the mindsets you need to cultivate while being CEO or having any other demanding job.”
“A lot of leadership is really who you are and how you enter the field you create around you,” he said.
Houston also recommended “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership,” by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp.
It “was really instrumental in helping me with some of the things that you don’t learn from sort of a textbook, around how to lead a company, how to navigate adversity, how to be the kind of person other people want to follow,” he said.
