There is a revealing article in today’s New York Times (the complete article can be found here) about how some of the most successful people in business today have large personal libraries that contain few of the best-selling business success books that fill the bookstores today. While this makes sense (why would somebody who is already successful
read books about how to become successful?), what is most surprising is what they are reading. According to this article, they are reading subjects that include:
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poetry (such as Blake)
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philosophy (such as Aristotle)
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classic literature
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classical works on science and weather (i.e., global climactic change)
Having a personal library has always been important to me as well. I am always buying (and even reading) books. Philosophy, adult education, classical literature, non-fiction, and academic and professional journals line my bookshelves. As they get full, I have to move them to other locations as well as weed-out the ones that just are not needed (which usually means they were never needed in the beginning). With all the increasing emphasis on electronic content delivery and management, I still like having books
in my hand, and I think Seth Godin expressed most concisely why this is:
Holding and owning the book, remembering when and how you got it… that’s what you’re paying for. Books are great at holding memories.
I think I will do some reading this afternoon. Ahh, the choices!
Technorati Tags: bookshelf, New York Times, personal library, Seth Godein
I just learned about an interesting discussion happening over on the Harvard Business School blog, How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater? The space for entering comments is open for another week, so go take a look.
This comes from some of the wonderful work by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton on evidence-based management. How does leadership effect performance? What evidence is there to support it? I have been interested this for a long time, and especially since I will be teaching a class in the next few weeks on at NYU’s SCPS.
While I am very interested in the evidence that is out there, I also realize that all the evidence in the world won’t make a difference if it is somebody else’s evidence and does not fit within my experience and my own goals and objectives; thus, I plan to take an action-learning perspective to this class (rather than just reading “the book” on the subject, as if there were such a thing out there). After all, can evidence ever really exist only “out there?”
Technorati Tags: Developing Leaders, evidence-based management, Harvard Business School , Jeffrey Pfeffer , NYU, Robert I. Sutton , SCPS
