Guardians,
As a young and evolving service, the United States Space Force must harness the power of innovative leadership to propel our success. Our operations require leaders who can navigate uncertainty, think creatively, and make bold decisions in the face of complex and rapidly emerging situations. To stay ahead of the curve, it’s essential that we emphasize the importance of leadership development and create an atmosphere that encourages continuous learning, innovation, and progression.
At the heart of this effort is the development of leaders who embody the core values of the Space Force. We need Guardians who demonstrate strong Character through their actions and decisions, build strong Connections with their teams and stakeholders, show Commitment to our mission and vision, and exhibit Courage as we navigate this contested and competitive domain.
To support this vision, I'm excited to launch the inaugural edition of my Leadership Library, a resource designed to inspire Guardians to develop their leadership skills and stay at the forefront of Spacepower.
This library includes a curated selection of books exploring alternative views on leadership, productivity, the secrets to performance and satisfaction, creating a positive workplace culture, logical thinking and decision-making, and military history. Additionally, you can find additional insights in episodes of the Perigee Podcast and my quarterly memos, “The B-Line.”
We aspire to create a Space Force characterized by a culture of intellectual curiosity, creative problem-solving, and collaborative leadership. I encourage you to embark on a journey of continuous learning and commitment to mastery, to seek out new challenges and opportunities, and to never stop trying to be the best version of yourself.
Let's seize this opportunity to shape the future of our service, forge a generation of Guardians who will propel our nation to new heights, and secure our position in the space domain. Together, we'll build the Space Force we need to secure our nation's interest in, from and to space.
This is the Way!
John F. Bentivegna
Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force
Editor’s note: The CMSSF Leadership Library is a fluid set of media selected by CMSSF that evolves as novel ideas are published, recorded and debated. New entries will be added periodically throughout the year.
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
From the New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, a groundbreaking philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload. Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Most people believe the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Culture Is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence
In Culture Is the Way: How Leaders at Every Level Build an Organization for Speed, Impact, and Excellence, former NFL Pro, world-renowned keynote speaker, and management consultant Matt Mayberry delivers an incisive and hands-on blueprint to employee engagement and peak productivity. In the book, you'll explore how leaders, at every level, can build a workplace culture that drives organizational excellence and unleashes the full potential of every employee.
Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era
Investigating numerical misinformation, Daniel Levitin shows how mishandled statistics and graphs can give a grossly distorted perspective and lead us to terrible decisions. Wordy arguments, on the other hand, can easily be persuasive as they drift away from the facts in an appealing yet misguided way. The steps to better evaluate news, advertisements, and reports are clearly detailed. Ultimately, Levitin turns to what underlies our ability to determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. He grapples with the limits of what we can and cannot know. Case studies are offered to demonstrate the applications of logical thinking to quite varied settings, spanning courtroom testimony, medical decision-making, magic, modern physics, and conspiracy theories.
The Bomber Mafia Audiobook
In The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the podcast Revisionist History, uses original interviews, archival footage, and his trademark insight to weave together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in Central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard. As listeners hear these stories unfurl, Gladwell examines one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
1776
America’s beloved and distinguished historian presents, in a book of breathtaking excitement, drama, and narrative force, the stirring story of the year of our nation’s birth, 1776, interweaving, on both sides of the Atlantic, the actions and decisions that led Great Britain to undertake a war against her rebellious colonial subjects and that placed America’s survival in the hands of George Washington.
In this masterful book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence—when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.
2034 A Novel of the next World War
2034 mixes enough plausibility with suspense to deliver a chilling play-by-play of the fall of the United States’ global hegemony at the hands of an ascendant and technically savvy China. Written by author Elliot Ackerman and retired US admiral James Stavridis, the novel offers intrigue and action, but it bears a warning for today’s political leaders. 2034 posits that American hubris will spell disaster for the United States.
Project Hail Mary
A lone astronaut must save the earth from disaster in this incredible new science-based thriller from the number-one New York Times best-selling author of "The Martian." Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the Earth will perish. Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Experience “one of the best adventure books ever written” (Wall Street Journal) in this New York Times bestseller: the harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole. In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.
Paradox Bound
Eli’s willing to admit it: he’s a little obsessed with the mysterious woman he met years ago. Okay, maybe a lot obsessed. But come on, how often do you meet someone who’s driving a hundred-year-old car, clad in Revolutionary-War-era clothes, wielding an oddly modified flintlock rifle—someone who pauses just long enough to reveal strange things about you and your world before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires?
Perigee is a US Space Force podcast hosted 
by the Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John F. Bentivegna with special guests.
Episode 35 of the Perigee Podcast, hosted by Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John Bentivegna, live from the Space Force Association's SPACEPOWER Conference in Orlando, Florida. In this episode, we'll discuss effective communication within the U.S. Space Force, bringing together a panel of experts to delve into the current state of communication and explore the most effective platforms for sharing information.
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Episode 34 of the Perigee Podcast, hosted by Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John F. Bentivegna. The Space Force Personnel Management Act allows the Space Force to design an alternative single military personnel management system that integrates active component Guardians and AFR Airmen serving in space-focused career fields into a unified service, offering full- and part-time work roles.
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Episode 32, Pt. 2 of the Perigee Podcast, hosted by Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John F. Bentivegna. Space Force Generation, or SPAFORGEN, cycles guardians through three phases -- prepare, ready and commit -- and is the service’s model for assigning and allocating forces to combatant commands. Part 2 of 2.
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Episode 32, Pt. 1 of the Perigee Podcast, hosted by Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John F. Bentivegna. Space Force Generation, or SPAFORGEN, cycles guardians through three phases -- prepare, ready and commit -- and is the service’s model for assigning and allocating forces to combatant commands. Part 1 of 2.
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Episode 31 of the Perigee Podcast, hosted by Chief Master Sergeant of the Space Force John F. Bentivegna.
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