Reading Lessons

photography by Elizabeth Lavin

As parents, business executives and professionals are ardent advocates of reading for their children. They know that literacy skills and books are linked to a child’s educational success. But when these parents are in the stratosphere of top management, what happens to their own reading habits? 

A few CEOs declined to discuss what they read, but most reported being active readers. They said, yes, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of business reading available. After all, there are countless daily papers with business sections. And, all the CEOs quoted here get some combination of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Investor’s Business Daily, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, and The Economist—not to mention, of course, D Magazine and DallasCEO. (The Journal seems secure in its preeminent position with business leaders. It scored 100 percent in readership in our less-than-scientific-but-still-telling survey.)That adds up to a lot of paper. Of the 172,000 books published in the U.S. in 2005, several thousand were successful business books. The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman’s no. 1 best seller, is 593 pages.

CEOs have different techniques to prioritize. Pete Bricker of SCM Advisors, an investment firm helping high net worth individuals and companies plan and manage investments, says, “I just try to read what I enjoy and what I find useful in my work.” Executive search firm luminary Bob Beaudine of Eastman & Beaudine says he’s an “avid reader,” and has “to discipline myself in reading because of the pace of my industry, which requires me to stay informed on hot trends and innovations.” Dr. Fred Bronstein, CEO of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, organizes reading methodically into what’s urgent, what needs to be dealt with in one or two weeks, what relates to issues he needs to deal with, what’s interesting in business, what’s interesting in the artistic world, and a final pile he calls “what’s completely unrelated but must [be] read eventually.”

The CEOs we spoke to all identified some business books as important and influential, although they chose an eclectic mix. Beaudine recommended Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, and Talent by Tom Peters. Bricker pointed to The Money Game by Adam Smith and Once in Golconda by John Brooks.  Bronstein noted Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great (both of which appear to be his work plan for the DSO and one reason the Dallas Symphony has the healthiest balance sheet of any symphony in the country).

And they’re all in the middle of several books. David Scholes, CEO of Targetbase, one of the nation’s leading direct mail and marketing firms, is reading John Stossel’s Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity and just finished Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics. Bricker is in the middle of Charles Ellis’ Capital: The Story of Long-Term Investment Excellence and just finished Roger Lowenstein and Christopher Browne’s The Little Book of Value Investing.

More important than what they read, they say, is why they read. Lucy Billingsley, recognized nationally and internationally for her business success and her vision for development on a human scale says, “I get totally absorbed in reading to understand all the big questions of our business, our society, our world, and life. I want to understand the societal undercurrents of every generation, so we know how to build environments that reflect the world they want to live in. I want to understand the world order and its shifts. To understand life, I want to read about the brain, read poetry, read of other cultures, current events, and history.” So her bookshelf includes Urban Tribes, The Culture Code, The J Curve, and The Long Tail.

Billingsley’s language is echoed by the others we talked to. “Reading is the essence of being an informed, literate, and interesting person,” Bronstein says. “It breathes life into the mind.” (“I’d say exactly the same thing about listening to great music,” he adds.) Beaudine says, “Reading opens my mind to the world of new possibilities and ignites my imagination. When I read great books by truly great authors, I am reminded that there are others drinking from the same fountain of fresh new ideas.” 

Searching for new ideas was a common theme. The intensely private Morton Meyerson describes himself as a “voracious reader,” but he notes that these days, he absorbs material electronically, choosing “mainly articles, videos, [and] columns on the Net.” Meyerson is well-known for circulating items he considers cutting-edge or challenging to his wide circle of friends. Earlier this year, he sent 10 insightful essays on modern Islam by Israeli historian Paul Liptz, urging friends to take the time to absorb, not just glance at them. (And he sent them out twice.)

Scholes says constant reading is important because “as a CEO, we are always being told the ‘absolute truth,’ but we all know we are only getting half the story—and a biased half at that.” He says ongoing reading lets him intuit the big picture.

While searching for insight to the future, many look to the past. FedEx’s iconic chairman and CEO, Fred Smith, has been quoted saying that he learned far more from historical leaders like Alexander the Great and General George Marshall than from business books. FedEx’s track record had been first rate: Using a compound annual growth rate, the stock is up 19 percent over a 10-year period, revenue increased 12.1 percent, and earnings per share are up 15.8 percent, so presumably Alex and George had useful lessons.
Some of these CEOs are right there with him.

“I’ve been reading a lot of American history lately, focused around the Civil War,” Bricker says. “Charles Bracelen Flood’s Lee: The Last Years, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln. Probably the best history book I’ve read in years was David Potter’s The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861.” Bricker, as others who read a lot of history, believes it offers unique insights into today’s events.

In the late ’90s, Bricker didn’t believe what he saw in the market and took his clients into what he considered safe havens, which took courage. “Unfortunately, caution wasn’t well-rewarded during that time and that made for difficult conversations with at least a few of my clients.” Bricker’s management record looked like genius by 2002. Stocks like Cisco had slid from 82 to 8.

Bronstein also finds history inspiring as well as useful, particularly biographies, and has blown through Robert Dallek’s Flawed Giant about LBJ and An Unfinished Life about John F. Kennedy, Stephen Ambrose’s Nixon, and David McCullough’s biography on John Adams. His reasons: “I find most interesting how these individuals dealt with leadership. They’re all different. It reminds me that leadership is painful, challenging, and exhilarating.”

While research confirms the link between early literacy and academic success, there has been an ongoing debate about whether continual reading makes one smarter throughout life. However, academic literature now seems to lean to the view that it does. Dr. K.E. Stanovich of the Ontario Institute writes in a paper entitled “Does reading make you smarter? Literacy and the development of verbal intelligence,” that “our data demonstrate time and time again that print exposure is associated with vocabulary, general knowledge, and verbal skills.”
But these things aren’t on the minds of our reading CEOs. They’re looking for inspiration. Beaudine, whose firm was singled out by The Wall Street Journal as the “top executive recruiting firm in college sports” and featured in October’s DallasCEO, puts his finger on what these CEOs say is the difference between management and leadership and between leadership and what they are after. “Inspirational reading is good for the soul,” he says. “Only the inspired can truly inspire.”

Bronstein agrees. “The search for excellence is never-ending, and it’s always an interesting journey.”

Merrie Spaeth is one of the pre-eminent crisis management strategists in the world. After serving as President Ronald Reagan’s director of media relations at the White House, she founded Dallas-based Spaeth Communications in 1987.  (Full disclosure: her clients have included FedEx.) In addition to her duties as president, Merrie is a lecturer at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business.