Category Report
Which titles are driving leadership and workplace conversations this year, based on mentions across leading business podcasts.
Biggest mover: The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries #7, rising 194 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 1328 books had their debut mentions.
How to Be Awesome at Your Job drove the most book chatter, with 13% of this years book mentions.
Across 2025’s most-discussed books, podcast conversations coalesce around three preoccupations: building durable advantage, operating with ruthless efficiency, and upgrading personal effectiveness. Strategy classics like 7 Powers, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Zero to One, and The Lean Startup are repeatedly invoked to decode moats, disruption risk, and how to design products and companies that can survive AI-driven and other structural shifts. Sam Walton’s autobiography and the Elon Musk biography anchor a strong operational theme: leaders are mining exemplars who combine frugality, intensity, and hands-on execution. In parallel, Atomic Habits and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People signal continued demand for pragmatic behavior change and values-driven productivity, while Influence and Think and Grow Rich frame persuasion and mindset as core commercial skills. The unusually strong focus on 7 Powers in particular suggests a growing anxiety about defensibility in a world where traditional margins, distribution, and IP feel less secure.
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer
16
mentions
Sam Walton: Made in America
Sam Walton
16
mentions
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear
13
mentions
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton M. Christensen
11
mentions
Think and Grow Rich
Napoleon Hill
11
mentions
Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B Cialdini
10
mentions
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Eric Ries
9
mentions
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
9
mentions
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey, Jim Collins, Sean Covey
9
mentions
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
9
mentions
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy to #1.
Significant outlier with 10.8x 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.
Up 194 places from #201 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 #1474.
No mentions after ranking #4 last year.
Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence to #1488.
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 entrepreneurship podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the voices founders and operators trust most for playbooks, launches, and long-term strategy.
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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