Category Report
Which titles are driving leadership and workplace conversations this year, based on mentions across leading business podcasts.
Biggest mover: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl #9, rising 254 places.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear was the top newcomer at #3. In total 1749 books had their debut mentions.
The Next Big Idea Daily drove the most book chatter, with 14% of this years book mentions.
Across 2025, the most talked-about books cluster around a blend of enduring strategy, cost discipline, and personal adaptability in a turbulent environment. At the core, Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers stands out as a dominant reference point, shaping how investors and founders think about moats and durable advantage in an AI-driven, highly competitive landscape. Alongside it, The Innovator’s Dilemma underscores anxiety about disruptive threats, especially to incumbents in tech, healthcare, and government. A second throughline is operational rigor and execution, with Sam Walton: Made in America repeatedly cited for extreme cost control and frugality as a lasting edge. Complementing these are titles like Atomic Habits, Think Again, Man’s Search for Meaning, and A CEO for All Seasons, signaling that leaders are equally preoccupied with individual behavior change, resilience, and navigating the full arc of leadership roles—not just capturing growth, but sustaining it through uncertainty and personal reinvention.
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer
18
mentions
Sam Walton: Made in America
Sam Walton
17
mentions
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
16
mentions
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton M. Christensen
13
mentions
Think and Grow Rich
Napoleon Hill
13
mentions
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey, Jim Collins, Sean Covey
11
mentions
Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B Cialdini
11
mentions
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
Adam Grant
11
mentions
Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl
10
mentions
A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership
Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra, Kurt Strovink
10
mentions
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy to #1.
Significant outlier with 11.5x as many mentions as the average book.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones to #3.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
Man's Search for Meaning to #9.
Up 254 places from #263 last year.
Sam Walton: Made in America to #2.
Down from #1 last year
The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It to #1914.
No mentions after ranking #4 last year.
Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence to #1928.
No mentions after ranking #7 last year.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this year.
Mentions recorded per 30-day window (past 8 months)
How many of the mentions were for the top 10 books.
The podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the trusted voices in this category.
We ingest public RSS feeds, analyze each episode, extract book mentions with AI, and validate with humans. The resulting data is normalized and deduplicated, building the canonical signal for the MavenSignal platform. Every insight and ranking is drawn from that verified layer.
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