Business leaders do not often take the time to read (e)books. Are they making a mistake?

Why
do great leaders read books?
“Each employee is required to read one recommended book per year.” Here is what Chinese
business tycoon Wang Jianlin, who leads the Dalian Wanda Group, asks his entire staff to do
(The ‘Read One Book Per Year’ requirement is part of the company’s official mission statement).
While the book lover in me does not believe that reading should be mandatory, Mr. Wang’s
action made me reflect on the possible leadership advantages of cultivating reading habits. Can
reading – and not just expert articles and business books but also novels, narrative history and
well written biographies for instance – make people better leaders?
Scientific research and experience suggest it can. Here is how.

1. Reading literary fiction improves empathy

Empathy, or the ability to step into other people’s (business partners, team member, clients)
shoes and understand their feelings and perspectives, is a crucial leadership quality. Empathy,
research suggests, is a something we can train. By showing genuine interest in the people we
meet and work with, for instance, and be attentive listeners. Or by reading books. Psychologists
David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of theNew School for Social Research have shown
that reading, literary fiction in particular, enhances one’s ability to understand other people’s
emotions. In a series of experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read.
The researchers then used a variety of techniques to measure how accurately the participants
could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read
literary fiction than for those with non-fiction texts. Discover more about how reading books can
improve empathy.

2. Reading helps to create vision

When Jane Goodall, the 80-year young global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and
the environment, spoke in Brussels in May 2014, she shared the following story:
‘I had the most amazing mother. She supported this love for animals that I had (…). She found
books for me to read, about animals, because she thought ‘that will make Jane read faster.’
When I was ten years old, I found for myself a little book, called ‘Tarzan of the Apes.’ I had just
enough pocket money to buy it, and I took it home with me, and took it up my favorite tree and I
read it from cover to cover. Of course, I fell in love with Tarzan. This glorious lord of the jungle,
of course I fell in love with him. Living with the animals… And what did Tarzan do? He married
the wrong Jane! That is when I knew: I will grow up, I will go to Africa, I will live with animals and
I will write books about them.’
What makes Goodall such a charismatic leader? Why do people all over the world listen to her
message – ‘There is still much beauty left, but we have to get together to save it, for our
children, and our children’s children’ – feel inspired by it, and decide to take action? Because
she has such a strong and compelling vision. And it’s a book that helped her to create it.
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading,
you can only think what everyone else is thinking. – Haruki
Murakami
3. Reading across cultures increases cross-
cultural effectiveness
In our globalized economy, a leader’s ability to build successful teams and collaboration across
cultures has become a crucial competency.
Reading across cultures can help you to develop your own cross-cultural leadership. By helping
you to see beyond the cultural do’s and don’ts, and focus on the people behind unfamiliar habits
and behavior. As Chinese writer Xue Xinran tells Westerners dealing with Chinese people:
‘Understanding the Chinese is just like how you would try to understand a tree. It is not just the
leaves and the branches, your have to understand the roots as well.’ (Find the China books Xue
Xinran recommends onFiveBooks.com).
In addition, reading across cultures will likely make you question your own assumptions and
business habits more. Research by Harvard Business School’s Roy Chua shows that leaders
who develop this kind of ‘cultural metacognition’ build stronger trust, and increase cross-cultural
effectiveness. Find more about Roy Chua’s findings here.

.4. Reading across time can put your own

leadership challenges into perspective
To conclude: history is littered with business leaders who successfully led change, often in the
face of obstacles at least as big as leaders face today. Reading their stories can give you fresh
perspectives, and make the leadership challenges that you face look less daunting.
Some examples:
Andrew Carnegie, born poor, built a steel imperium in times of unprecedented change, and
proceeded to give his fortune away.
Gerard Heineken, recently brought to life by Dutch writer Annejet van der Zijl, bought a small
brewery in Amsterdam – even when he knew nothing about beer and people at the time did not
like drinking it. Thanks to Heineken’s leadership, that small brewery became the Heineken
company the whole world knows today.
Or read how a more recent business leader, Richard Branson, ‘survived, had fun and made a
fortune doing business his way’.