Book Value

A business writer offers a reading list for entrepreneurs that includes many titles not related to business.

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To judge by the best-seller lists, a lot of people think you can become a leader by reading books. You can -- but they're not the ones you'd expect

Executives should read fewer management books. I don't mean that reading is a waste of their time; on the contrary, they should read more. The question is what to read. My own view is that only one book in 20 should be a business book.

That may sound odd coming from an author of three management books, but I'm convinced that you can improve your leadership capabilities by drinking deeply from the well of great books that have been published in a wide variety of disciplines. For one thing, the business and management genres offer precious few superb books with new insights, good writing, and timeless value. I can think of fewer than 10 published in the last 50 years.

More important, outstanding leaders and thinkers often get their best insights by reading outside their primary field. Abraham Lincoln, for example, forged his thinking on the slavery question by reading Euclid's ancient treatise on geometry and then applying the concept of logical proof to the great issue of the day. Charles Darwin read about Adam Smith's economic concept of the "invisible hand" while struggling to formulate his biological concept of natural selection (which, of course, became the invisible hand in the theory of evolution). Peter Drucker told me that the most influential author in his intellectual development was the Danish existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard. The great entrepreneur Henry Ford avidly read essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and applied Emerson's ideas to his company.

Here are a handful of my most highly recommended selections:

· Chimpanzee Politics, by Frans de Waal. Even more enlightening than Machiavelli's The Prince, this book describes power takeovers and social organizations in a chimpanzee colony and argues that power politics is part of the evolutionary heritage we share with our closest nonhuman relatives. I'll never look at academic or corporate politics the same way, and I understand their machinations much better for having read this book. Chimps, unlike humans, do not cloak their political pretenses in rhetoric, so we can see more clearly the process at work and thereby learn much about ourselves.

· The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman. This book may well have saved the world from nuclear holocaust. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy drew directly upon the lessons of Tuchman's book -- which chronicles how, in August 1914, European nations locked themselves into irreversible political and military positions and thereby needlessly brought about the slaughter of World War I. In the midst of the missile crisis, Kennedy said, "I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book [about the missile crisis]." Superbly written, this book teaches valuable lessons about how an organization can be led or driven into calamity through pride, arrogance, and misunderstanding.

· Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini, and The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence, by Philip G. Zimbardo. I don't see how anyone can hope to be an effective manager without having a basic understanding of social psychology -- the forces of human influence and the dynamics of social behavior. These two classic works, both jam-packed with specific examples and fascinating research studies, teach invaluable managerial lessons. For example, revolutionary change can best be accomplished by "incremental revolutionaries," who lead people from A to Z by taking small steps from A to B, then from B to C, then from C to D, and so on, so that the step from Y to Z hardly looks like a revolution at all. Another tidbit: explicitly assign people to play devil's advocate -- to "consider the opposite" -- and thereby dilute the influence of groupthink that so often plays a role in disastrous decisions.

· In Love and War, by Jim and Sybil Stockdale. As the highest-ranking POW in the Hanoi Hilton -- in captivity and under physical and psychological torture for seven years -- Jim Stockdale displayed iron-willed integrity under the most severe conditions. Stockdale teaches that freedom is a state of mind and that the two greatest weapons of enslavement are guilt and fear, not bars and walls. Stockdale drew strength from Job in the Bible, with its central lesson that if you persist in asking, "Why me?" -- if you fail to accept that life is not fair -- you cannot endure.

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