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For Those Who Want to Lead, Read
Harvard Business Review ^ | 15AUG12 | John Coleman

Posted on 08/20/2012 7:01:25 AM PDT by Future Snake Eater

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile.

He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of adult Americans," and for the first time in American history, "less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature." Literacy has been improving in countries like India and China, but that literacy may not translate into more or deeper reading.

This is terrible for leadership, where my experience suggests those trends are even more pronounced. Business people seem to be reading less — particularly material unrelated to business. But deep, broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders and can catalyze insight, innovation, empathy, and personal effectiveness.

Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an "inexhaustible interest" in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets "the original systems thinkers," quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week. And history is littered not only with great leaders who were avid readers and writers (remember, Winston Churchill won his Nobel prize in...

(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.hbr.org ...


TOPICS: Books/Literature; Education; Miscellaneous; Society
KEYWORDS: 2012; davidpetraeus; doriskearnsgoodwin; freeperbookclub; hbr; leading; pages; reading; stevejobs
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To: Future Snake Eater

bflr

(No pun intended.)


21 posted on 06/13/2013 9:56:43 AM PDT by 444Flyer (How long Oh LORD?)
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To: Future Snake Eater
Ad from the 1950's.


22 posted on 06/13/2013 10:02:41 AM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear (Revenge is a dish best served with pinto beans and muffins)
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To: Monkey Face

And I just found your finding! Sorry, no ping list involved here. I’m a simple man, you see...


23 posted on 06/13/2013 3:11:47 PM PDT by Future Snake Eater (CrossFit.com)
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To: T-Bird45

Yeah,Jesus,couldn’t he have done better than DKG.She’s an “0fficial” historian type, and an MSM favorite,and is rumored to have slept with, or possibly just cuddled under the covers with the vile LBJ.He would’ve

served
himself better talking to someone like Anne Appelbaum.
.


24 posted on 12/14/2013 2:41:26 PM PST by supremedoctrine
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To: Future Snake Eater

“Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
G. M. Trevelyan


25 posted on 09/10/2014 9:40:56 AM PDT by SMARTY ("When you blame others, you give up your power to change." Robert Anthony)
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