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Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston's favorite books on business and management include these 4 must-reads
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.
Forbes
28-03-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Hacking The Job Interview: Know What You ‘Suck' At
An interviewer shakes hands with a job applicant during a job interview. With the labor market ... More tight, how should individuals best "hack the job interview"?(Photo by) I still remember my shock when a fellow panelist at a conference years ago told audience members that his biggest advice to get a job was to lie on your resume and in the interviews. Coming off a decade in which there had been notable instances of people getting fired for having fabricated experiences on their resume, the ethics couldn't have been clearer from my perspective. A decade later, in an era where AI tools are helping people fine tune their resumes to match the skills and credentials asked for in job descriptions, if that's one bright line in the sand that you still shouldn't cross, how do you navigate the delicate balance between self-promotion and humility as you're seeking to get a job? One thing I've learned from my colleague Bob Moesta, co-founder of the Jobs to Be Done theory and a serial innovator and entrepreneur, is that when you're developing a product or company, it's not enough to know what you want it to do. You also need to know what it's going to 'suck at doing.' That's true with individuals as well. Although one of the most popular job interview questions is 'What is your greatest weakness?', most people answer it with a nod to their strengths. As in, 'My greatest weakness is that I work too hard!' A better approach is to take a page from product development and not just figure out what your assets are, but also what you're bad at doing and don't want to do. Don't be afraid to share those insights rather than wait to be asked. That not only helps you avoid landing a job that's going to be a bad fit—where you are bored, disgruntled, disengaged, or doing a poor job—but it also sets you up as someone who is honest and a straightshooter. For example, Bob is dyslexic. Landing in jobs where he was expected to write in his early career was a recipe for disaster. And yet, today, he's authored several books (including two with me—and one about getting your next job called Job Moves). How? Bob assembles a team where he can lean into what he's good at doing—conducting research, building and testing processes, generating insights, recognizing patterns that few others can see because he's dyslexic—and let folks like me take care of the writing. Recognizing that reality doesn't force Bob to do something he isn't good at and that drains his energy, but instead allows the team around him to leverage the things he's great at doing. This sort of honesty is something companies should appreciate. As Peter Drucker observed in The Effective Executive, organizations often fixate on finding individuals who lack significant weaknesses. But what they should do is look for people with outstanding strengths—and then build teams around them to accentuate the strengths and offset the weaknesses. Creating this kind of honesty will solve a problem I see far too frequently in hiring. One person I coached got to the final round of the interview process for a project manager role at a tech startup—only for the company to then discover that she didn't have the technical chops for the role. That should have been clear up-front to all involved. A second insight from our research in Job Moves is that for established roles, you should go into your interviews already knowing what the day-to-day and week-to-week of the job would be like—and how it maps on to what you do and don't like doing. This isn't about memorizing the job description—largely a meaningless hodgepodge of skills, qualifications and platitudes about work style and culture cribbed from past job descriptions and competitors' postings. This is more about actually understanding what people do in the job. Not what the title is, but what are the actual tasks? How does this person actually work with others? What is the culture? And the way you can learn about that is by having informational interviews with people who already have the role you want—and literally asking them how their day-to-day and week-to-week maps on to the things you want to be doing and the type of work that drives and drains your energy. By doing that, when you get into the interview, you can share your story and explain with real substance how your experiences and assets map onto the work that needs to be done. And you can be honest about where there will be tradeoffs—for you or for the employer—so you can start to craft the job with more intentionality. Both of these ideas take some real work up-front—of learning about yourself and learning about the work of others. But it's work worth doing so you can lead with authenticity as you seek not just to land a job, but also find one that will be a great fit for you and your future employer.
