Many CEOs shun business books
What books do you imagine filling a CEO’s library? Actually, this question can be broadened from CEO to anyone who has reached a high level of success in life. You might be thinking business books, investor guides and other dry writing that would have most of us asleep in seconds. And you’d be wrong.
Many of the most successful people in the business world today have a surprisingly literary library, where non-fiction business books are the rare commodity. According to an article from the New York Times, these high-powered movers and shakers seek something else from their reading material:
Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete.
It’s hard to describe the subtle difference that the above passage is trying to convey. A business-oriented book, for example might give successful sales strategies by laying them out in layman’s terms so the reader can easily absorb the main point without much thought. In other words, the point of the book is being spoon fed to the reader.
More literary-oriented books like Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, or even someone like Aristotle, the main point and meaning must be derived from the entire text – and it takes a much deeper level of thought and logic to string the pieces together. Just like in business, not everything is obvious and a successful leader must have the ability to use abstract thinking to solve the many problems that are bound to arise.
Michael Mortiz, a venture capitalist who made his fortune by helping companies like Google, Yahoo!, and Paypal, tries to vary his reading greatly:
"I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction," Mr. Moritz said. "I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s ‘Swimming Across,’ which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel."
And surprisingly, one genre appears to be a little more popular than the others with some managers. You might be surprised to know that it’s poetry:
Poetry speaks to many C.E.O.’s. "I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers," says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports. Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington, Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. "Poets are our original systems thinkers," he said. "They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand."
Who would have guessed that the least popular of all the genres (poetry) would be so popular among the business elite? Poets do take things that are incredibly complex, sometimes ideas/concepts that are impossible to describe (ie. love, death, heroism, etc), and make them tangible to the reader.
This is where the study of literature can be invaluable to budding leaders. The problem is, however, that most people see the study of something like literature and philosophy as just useless exercises with the mind – they actually have no usefulness in the "real world."
But those people are wrong. It’s not the actual subject matter that is always important. Instead, it’s the thought process of being able to piece together an argument by Plato (for example). Being able to comprehend what his argument is and then construct a valid counter-argument is really what the nuts and bolts of what studying literature and philosophy is all about. This type of thinking can’t be taught in some training manual, or even explained, this type of thinking must be learned by doing.
So if you’re thinking about being a CEO, maybe you should start stocking your personal library with some Shakespeare and maybe even a little Kant to spice things up.
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