A Reading List for the Differently Wired Leader
Books we keep returning to, for leaders, professionals and high-achievers who think differently.
This is not a list of books about managing ADHD symptoms. It is a list of books that change the way you understand your brain, your career, your history, and your next chapter. Some are clinical and grounding. Some are personal and raw. Some have nothing to do with ADHD on the surface and everything to do with it underneath.
We have organised them into sections, but most of them bleed across categories. Start wherever the title stops you.
ADHD Girls to Women: Getting on the Radar
The most clinically rigorous book on this list and the one we would hand to any clinician who doubts the female ADHD presentation. Skoglund is one of the world's leading researchers on ADHD across the sexes. She connects the latest science with the testimonies of neurodivergent women across the lifespan, covering hormones, emotional regulation, the workplace and family life, and produces something that reads like both a validation and a roadmap. If you want to understand why the diagnosis took so long, this is the book that explains it with evidence rather than anger.
You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!
First published in 1993 and still essential. The title alone has been the moment of recognition for thousands of women who picked it up decades before their diagnosis and felt, perhaps for the first time, that someone was describing them accurately. Written by two women with ADHD, for adults with ADHD, at a time when the clinical community was barely acknowledging adult ADHD at all. What it lacks in more recent hormonal and gender research it more than compensates for in warmth, precision, and the particular comfort of being seen by someone who has lived it.
ADHD: An A-Z
Leanne Maskell was diagnosed at 25, trained at the ADD Coach Academy, and went on to found ADHD Works, present to the World Health Organisation, and train companies including Google and Microsoft. Her book is structured alphabetically, a format that Maskell uses to make a large amount of information genuinely navigable. It is particularly useful for the pre-diagnosis and early post-diagnosis period, and for anyone who wants a practical companion for the journey rather than a clinical overview.
The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit
Moryoussef was diagnosed at 40 and has built one of the most-listened-to ADHD podcasts in the UK in the years since. Her book, published by DK, brings the psychology and science behind the challenges faced by women with ADHD alongside practical tools for managing hormonal burnout, emotional regulation, and the process of rediscovering yourself post-diagnosis. It sits firmly in the wellbeing lane rather than the professional lane, but it is warm, credible, and full of practical strategies that work. The hormonal section is particularly strong.
A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD
Sari Solden has been counselling women with ADHD for over 35 years and wrote the first book specifically addressing women and ADHD in 1995. This guide, co-authored with Michelle Frank, is her most practically empowering work. It starts from the premise that the problem is not the ADHD but the shame that has accumulated around it, and builds outward from there. For any woman who has spent years believing the narrative that she is the problem, this book offers a structured and compassionate dismantling of that belief. It is not light reading, but it is necessary reading.
ADHD for Smart Ass Women
Tracy Otsuka is a lawyer turned certified ADHD coach whose podcast of the same name has accumulated over five million downloads. The book is exactly what the title suggests: unapologetic, direct, and specifically aimed at high-achieving women who are done being told to manage their way to neurotypicality. Otsuka's argument, built from years of coaching and her own experience of late diagnosis, is that the ADHD brain is not a disorder to be overcome but a different operating system to be understood and used deliberately. The closest US equivalent to the voice The Hyperfocused is building.
Unmasked
Middleton was diagnosed with autism and ADHD at 24 and has since built a community of over 300,000 people online. Her book is personal, warm, and specifically aimed at the experience of masking in a world that was not designed for your brain. It is not a clinical text and it does not try to be. What it is, is a first-person account of what it costs to hide and what becomes possible when you stop. Younger in tone than some of the other books on this list, but the masking chapters are some of the most clearly articulated in the genre.
The Power of Different
Saltz is a psychiatrist and clinical associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. Her book examines the relationship between neurological difference and exceptional talent, covering ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety and depression, and argues with evidence that these are not conditions that exist despite exceptional ability but often because of the same neural wiring that produces it. For any woman who has wondered whether the thing that made her career hard and the thing that made her good at it might be the same thing, this book is the answer. The chapter on ADHD and creative leadership is particularly relevant.
ADHD 2.0
Hallowell and Ratey wrote the book that defined public understanding of ADHD in 1994 with Driven to Distraction. This update, published in 2021, integrates thirty years of subsequent neuroscience and recasts ADHD as a variable rather than a deficit: a condition of enormous contextual sensitivity that produces dramatically different outcomes depending on environment, support, and self-knowledge. It is the most scientifically current book on this list for understanding the neurological mechanisms, and the most useful for having informed conversations with clinicians and employers who are still working from older frameworks.
Burnout: The Secret to Solving the Stress Cycle
This book does not mention ADHD, which is precisely why it belongs here. The Nagoski sisters write about the specific experience of women navigating environments that were not designed for them, the stress cycle and what it means to actually complete it rather than suppress it, and the particular kind of burnout that comes from performing wellness rather than experiencing it. For any woman who has read everything about ADHD burnout and still felt there was something missing about the gendered dimension of it, this book is that missing piece. Read it alongside the ADHD-specific literature rather than instead of it.