Guest Blog from Michele Lucia, Speaker Manager for David Cottrell

Recently, I received the following question:

“On p.155 of Monday Morning Motivation, David mentions that he would assign 10 books for his new district managers to read.  Can I have a copy of that list?”

I thought you might be interested in David’s reply:

The books that I assigned at FedEx were the ones that I thought were the most important for new managers at that time.  It has been over 20 years but many of those books had a significant impact on my team and still have an impact on my writing.  Currently, I am not where I can easily find the list but I know that Managing the Equity Factor, One Minute Manager, The Whole Manager, See You at the Top, Seven Habits, and Who’s Got the Monkey were among the books I used.

That was before I had written any books and when I began writing, brevity became one of the criteria for CornerStone publications. Here is a line-up that I would suggest today:

1. Monday Morning Mentoring Or Monday Morning Leadership (Mentoring is two chapters – about 50 pages longer – than the original MMLeadership)
2. 175 Ways to Get More Done in Less Time
3. The Manager’s Coaching Handbook
4. 136 Effective Presentation Tips
5. Indispensable!
6. The Eight Constants of Change
7. The Magic Question (I think is the best for new managers)
8. The Managers Conflict Resolution Handbook
9. Tuesday Morning Coaching
10. Winning with Accountability

Most of those are short, to the point books that someone could read in less than 3 hours.  I wrote almost all of them with the specific purpose of helping new managers in their most challenging areas of management. They are all available at

Other great books you could use would be:
1. Uncontainable by Kip Tindell
2. Winning by Jack Welch
3. Sam Walton’s 10 Rules of Business
4. Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia
5. Let’s Start Meeting and Emailing Like This by George Lowe & Tony Jeary

All of those books are longer and may take more than 3 hours to read but really good stuff. I hope this helps.

Good luck and much prosperity for you and your team.