Summer is here. And while the activities we have enjoyed in years past may be put on hold this season, there is one activity that we should all continue to embrace: summer reading. Now, more than ever, busy executives need time to themselves to recharge the batteries, and few activities are better than reading a great book under the sun.
Chief Financial Officers are voracious readers, though the demands of their careers make it challenging to do so consistently. Summer vacation is an ideal time for executives to catch-up on books they have missed during busier times. I asked a group of CFOs to identify at least two books they plan to read this summer: one that was focused business, and for leisure. A summary of their recommendations follows:
Business Books
1. The 80/20 CFO: How to Make Strategic Transformations in Your Company, Janice Berthold & Suzy Taherian
2. The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, Patrick Lencioni
3. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou
4. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy – Thomas Sowell
5. Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It, Brian Dumaine
6. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
7. The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers, Baruch Lev and Feng Gu
8. Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond, Alasdair Nairn
9. Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
10. Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, Robert C. Pozen
11. Financial Wellbeing: The Big Taboo, Morrinson Wellbeing
12. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, Martin E. P. Seligman
13. The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler
14. The Infinite Game, Simon Sinek
15. The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, Gregory Zuckerman
16. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Robert J. Shiller
17. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for its Life Without Losing its Soul, Howard Schultz & Joanne Gordon
18. Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio
19. Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life, Hal Gregersen & Ed Catmull
20. The Ride of a Lifetime Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of Walt Disney Company, Bob Iger
21. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek
22. The Successful CFO, Tony Tripodo
23. That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea, Marc Randolph
24. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, Timothy Ferriss
25. This is Not a Fashion Story: Taking Chances, Breaking Rules, and Being a Boss in the Big City, Danielle Bernstein & Emily Siegel
26. Unlocking Creativity: How to Solve Any Problem and Make the Best Decisions by Shifting Creative Mindsets, Michael A. Roberto
27. What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, Ben Horowitz & Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Perhaps what is most interesting about this list is that not one selection was
duplicated. It is also noteworthy that only a handful of these books deal with accounting or corporate finance, and only two are specific to CFOs (The 80/20 CFO and The Successful CFO). Reflecting the modern role of the chief financial officer, the books these executives read focus on strategy, leadership, and problem-solving. Truly, finance chiefs priorities are making their organizations competitive to judge by their reading selections.
Reading business books is important, but so too is reading simply for pleasure. So, what does these executives read when outside the realm of professional development?
Leisure Reading:
1. The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat Loss, Incredible Sex and Becoming Superhuman, Timothy Ferriss
2. Archenemies, Marissa Meyer
3. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
4. The Badass Body Diet: The Breakthrough Diet and Workout for a Tight Booty, Sexy Abs, and Lean Legs, Christmas Abbott
5. The Barracks Thief, Tobias Wolff
6. Becoming, Michelle Obama
7. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
8. Camino Winds, John Grisham
9. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Ronan Farrow
10. Down Under, Bill Bryson
11. The Dutch House, Ann Patchett
12. Educated: A Memoir, Tara Westover
13. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny, William Strauss & Neil Howe
14. The Great Mortality, John Kelly
15. The Happy Body: The Simple Science of Nutrition, Exercise, and Relaxation, Aniela & Jerzy Gregorek
16. A History of Civilizations, Fernand Braudel and Richard Mayne
17. The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis
18. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, Jon Krakauer
19. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl, William J. Winslade, and Harold S. Kushner
20. Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell
21. The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, Naoki Higashida and David Mitchell
22. The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, John R. Bolton
23. Salvation Is from the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming, Roy H. Schoeman
24. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Carol Rovelli
25. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, Juan Williams
26. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance & Survival, John Vaillant
27. Truman, David McCullough (no relation)
28. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo and Michael Eric Dyson
Chief financial officers are an eclectic group, as demonstrated by this list. White Fragility is on the reading list of five different chief financial officers (out of 23 who responded), and no other book was listed more than once. This is not a surprise, as CFOs have shared that they are now making diversity and inclusion a greater priority than ever before, both in their personal and professional lives. While they have always valued diversity and inclusion, recent events have made it a higher priority. The reading selection shows that the commitment is real.
The most popular leisure reading topics among CFOs are history and biography which comprised almost half of the list. This is consistent with prior conversations I have held with finance chiefs. CFOs are passionate fiction readers and also are exploring health and wellness. Neither politics nor religion seems to be popular subjects for finance chiefs summer reading selections.
What conclusions can we draw from the CFO summer reading list? Well, the 23 respondents identified a total of 55 different books they planned to read this summer, and only one book was identified by more more than one reader. The demonstrates that, like most professionals, CFOs have eclectic tastes, and their literary preferences are as different as the challenges they face in their roles.
I close with a quote from George R.R. Martin, author of A Song of Fire and Ice, which was adapted into the television series Game of Thrones. “A mind needs a book as a sword needs its whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”