Also: this needs (2020) in the title.
I could recommend twenty more books that I think are essential to be a good leader (in various areas like ownership, communication, continuous improvement, planning, innovation, anthropology, visual control, calibrated estimation, etc.), but Deming stands way above everything else.
I also found it impossible to rank books, so instead I took roughly the top 20, grouped them into themes, and then ranked the themes based on how important I think they are.
1. Deming is the primary writer of the type of management we need to be competitive: Deming, The New Economics & Out of the Crisis.
2. There is a wide variety of ways for humans to organise. Nobody is forcing the default capitalist bureaucracy on you, so be creative: Graeber, Bullshit Jobs & Dawn of Everything & The Democracy Project.
3. How people are motivated: Pink, Drive.
4. How to create a high-trust, less authoritarian, open, collaborative environment within a traditional hierarchy: Marquet, Leadership is Language.
5. Communication: Voss, Never Split the Difference. Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.
6. How to help organisations who don't want to admit what their problem is: Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting.
7. How to structure organisations and processes to deliver maximum value: Reinertsen, Principles of Product Development Flow. Ward, Lean Product and Process Development. Womack, Machine That Changed the World.
8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder.
9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages.
10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning.
11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise.
I had to leave out a few about statistics, causality inference, project portfolio investment that didn't make the top 20 cut.
recently read that book. it's funny that the book wanted to show a diverse group of staff engineers and what they do. but i ended up thinking, oh wow, they are all pretty much saying the same thing. (there were a few exceptions)
but at least the book gives you an idea.