Category Report
Which titles are driving leadership and workplace conversations this month, based on mentions across leading business podcasts.
Biggest mover: CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra #1, rising 342 places.
The Next Big Idea Daily drove the most book chatter, with 15% of this months book mentions.
December’s cross-category list splits between two clusters: CEO- and strategy-focused business titles, and enduring works of literature that frame debates about culture, power, and technology. At the top, CEO Excellence and A CEO for All Seasons surge as executives look for structured playbooks on how leadership should evolve across different phases of a role, especially amid uncertainty and innovation pressure. Alongside The Innovator’s Dilemma, 7 Powers, Moneyball, Atomic Habits, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, this points to a strong emphasis on durable advantage, disciplined decision-making, and repeatable systems for high performance. In parallel, Huck Finn, 1984, and The Hunger Games surface in conversations about banned books, AI’s limits, and social control—signaling that many hosts and guests are grounding current questions about technology, ethics, and youth culture in classic narratives about freedom, surveillance, and resistance.
CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest
Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra
6
mentions
A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership
Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra, Kurt Strovink
6
mentions
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton M. Christensen
4
mentions
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini
4
mentions
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
3
mentions
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
3
mentions
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey, Jim Collins, Sean Covey
3
mentions
1984
George Orwell
3
mentions
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
3
mentions
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer
2
mentions
CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest to #1.
Significant outlier with 4.9x as many mentions as the average book.
CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest to #1.
Up 342 places from #343 last month.
The Hunger Games to #9.
Up 294 places from #303 last month.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to #358.
Down from #1 last month
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to #358.
No mentions after ranking #1 last month.
No mentions after ranking #2 last month.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this month.
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.
Ready for recommendations shaped by your favorite podcasts? Sign up and get your personalized feed.