Business

Brought to book - learning business from fiction writers

Are business books your choice of reading at the beach?
Are business books your choice of reading at the beach? Are business books your choice of reading at the beach?

A perfectly positioned pool lounger, sun at your face, the pool within touching distance, a cool beer perched by your side, the only question that remains is what book is in your hand?

It never turns out as flawless as that, but for me and I’ve no doubt many other readers, no matter what area of business they’re in, this is an ideal way to relax.

The hard part when there are so many other things to contend with is getting the time to ensure you have the right mix between a good novel and business focused books that re-energise and motivate for the months ahead. I find holidays are also a great time to reflect on the business successes and challenges that there have been in the year to date and the right book can really help with generating new ideas and highlighting areas that could be improved. After all, no matter what your area of work, there will always be change.

While he didn’t get it right all the time, Steve Jobs was a great exponent of change and he was a visionary of how business and consumer needs would evolve, often setting the agenda and bringing technology, functionality and art together in his products creating a demand where there had never been one before.

His book was one I had read before but I took it with me again this year more in the comfort that I could pick it if the others weren’t living up to expectation. While an amazing read not only on the basis that it charted Jobs’ role throughout the rise, fall and rise of Apple but of the complete evolution of the PC sector. As is well documented it painted the picture of a Jekyll and Hyde character who could charm, and treat people with complete contempt, in equal measure.

That book was always going to be a hit but getting a recommendation on a good holiday book always helps. Jobs’ great rival, not that he rated him, was of course Bill Gates who isn’t shy on sharing his favourite books. Last summer he released details of a number of non-fiction hardbacks he was reading, describing John Brook’s business adventures as the best business book he’d ever read.

Bringing to life historical successes and failures on Wall Street, it has been suggested that the book is as relevant today as it was when it was written 40 years ago. Well, if the last eight years have taught us anything, it is that economics does indeed have cycles, peaks and troughs and Wall Street and all the other global financial centres have to ride those waves and there will always be learnings through generations. As for John Brook’s book, with Gates’ attention demand increased significantly for the old manuscript.

In business there will always be leaders, economists, writers who’ll hit the right tone at the right time that connect with people. Thomas Piketty is a point in case with his book Capital in the Twenty First Century focusing on the concentration of wealth and how to go about redressing inequality. The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliot described ‘it as a rare phenomenon, an economic tome that flies off the shelves’. It’s not often that an academic book touches the masses.

For those that can’t reach Piketty’s notoriety (after all, 10 years of research went into his book), the endorsement of a celebrity such as Bill Gates inadvertently or otherwise always helps no matter what genre the book is in. When Mark Zuckerberg announced the start of his book club in a post on Facebook and his intention to read a book every other week, hundreds of thousands of likes soon followed with Perseus Book Groups, publishers of his first recommended book ‘The End of Power’, scrambling to do a print run and foreign rights queries pouring in from around the world.

Of course this celebrity endorsement can catapult authors, books, artists, products, businesses etc from obscurity to notoriety. Oprah is a master at it. She can get people to read Tolstoy, sell millions of magazines and turn a mail-order canvass bag into the latest ‘got to have’ item simply by naming it as one of her favourite things. She is so influential she can even create other celebrities such as Dr Phil.

Back to the books. I recall seeing Ed Miliband’s summer reading choices a few years ago which heavily focused on economic choices with one entitled ‘Leadership on the Line’. There are exceptions to every rule, and after the year he has had I doubt a recommendation from Ed would do much for that particular title.

As a committed book club member I enjoy fiction as well as well as fact and find that there are books that I would never have seen myself reading if I wasn’t part of a group, such as Stoner by John Williams, One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore and Red Leaves by Tomas H Cook. I have found there are business learnings that can be gained from fiction books too.

As for my one stand-out recommendation this summer it is ‘The Next 100 years’ by George Friedman, founder of Strategic Forecasting. He charts what he sees as likely global developments including China's decreasing international influence due to its instability and lack of innovation predicting the rise of Poland, Turkey and Japan with the US maintaining its status. Time will tell.

  •  Claire Aiken is managing director of Belfast and Dublin based public relations and public affairs company Aiken PR.