Once you buy Senge's ideas on Learning Organisations, the next obvious question is "how do I make it happen?" The trouble with the learning organisations is that you can't apply a prescriptive model - you have to learn your own way for your organisation - but in his follow-up book "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook", Senge and his colleagues offer some ideas to try.

It's said that de Geus originated the concept of the learning organisation during his long career with Royal Dutch Shell. Here he looks at what makes for a long-lasting company, and differentiates between those that aim to propagate and develop themselves, and those that are in it solely for the profit. This is more of a thought-provoking guidebook than a how-to manual, but it's a good read, and his ideas on sustainability and taking the long view have started to set a trend in many companies.

For years it was said that Knowledge and Intelligence were what you needed to get ahead. Yet we all knew that some of the most successful leaders were neither very clever nor very intelligent. It wasn't until 1995 that Daniel Goleman described this missing element as Emotional Intelligence. EQ (Emotional Quotient, as in IQ) measures our self-motivation, self-control and self-regulation. The thing that makes many people successful, Goleman says, is their ability to tap into the emotions of others, whilst regulating their own emotions to suit the situation.

The good news is that unlike IQ, EQ can be improved, and in "Working with Emotional Intelligence", Goleman looks at how you can do this and create an organisation that capitalises on the power of EQ.

This is pretty old stuff now, but in his time Tom Peters was a pioneer, the first management writer with a populist image. His seminars became sell-out entertainment as he stalked his audiences of senior executives haranguing them for not seeing the blindingly obvious. His books became international bestsellers, although most of the pathfinder companies he praised in, say, "In Search of Excellence" have notoriously failed to live up to his expectations. Yet the 45 prescriptions he sets out in Thriving On Chaos (or shouts out if you buy the audio version) still make a lot of sense. Unfortunately, leadership isn't that formulaic, and the Peters prescriptions need to be taken with a good dose of Senge-like commonsense. Read the book because it's thought-provoking, but then do what makes sense.

An odd title but an excellent book, described as "a practical manual for job-hunters and career-changers".  There's a wealth of ideas on how to find the right career, then apply successfully for jobs, albeit in the US job market.  But the real power of this book lies in its "Flower", a self-analysis tool that defines the anatomy of your ideal job.  Use it as a prompt to guide your thinking about what job you really want to do, or complete the exercise in full and have searing clarity about what you want and how to get it.  The book is revised annually, and a companion workbook is also available.

Subtitled "Developing the Next Generation of Leaders", this book looks at what you need to do to develop tomorrows leaders (by not modelling them on today's leaders, for a start). McCall has a long background in this field, and he and his team have worked with a wide range of global companies to come up with some practical ideas for leadership development.

O'Toole and McCall are sometime colleagues at USC, but their written approaches to leadership development are very different. O'Toole looks at historical leaders and events to draw some lessons on leading people through change - not least that in the future, real leadership will not come from the top of an organisation, but somewhere in the middle. Feel empowered, very empowered!

John Kotter is one of the leading writers on the management of change, and his thinking is widely published.  He's worth reading because his ideas are based on reality, and because his approaches are easy to understand and make sense.  "Leading Change" draws together a number of articles and books he's published on how to lead and direct change, and provides a useful summary of current thinking on the subject.

They say that we should always learn from our mistakes, so it's refreshing to find someone writing about why change doesn't work, rather than offering a rose-tinted formula that will work perfectly in all circumstances.  Robbins and Finley still offer models and solutions, but the probably go further than most in recognising the biggest difficulty of implementing change - people.  They explore why people resist change, and how you can be more effective if you bring them with you.