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  • Karen Boylston recommends

BOOKS: For your bookshelf—what CEOs are reading

Updated: May 1, 2020


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Enjoy this last month of summer! I'm heading to Maine to kayak and eat lobster with family and friends until September.

In the meantime, check out what CEOs are reading this year, compiled by McKinsey, for some great August reading, such as:

  • Churchill: The Power of Words, Martin Gilbert

  • Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy, Colin S. Gray

  • Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers: 50 Strategic Rules Updated for Today’s Business, Gerald A. Michaelson and Steven W. Michaelson

  • Lab Girl, Hope Jahren

  • Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

  • The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Daniel James Brown

  • Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder, Arianna Huffington

  • The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen

  • The Quantum Spy, David Ignatius

  • The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, Michael Lewis

  • Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal, Eugene Soltes

  • Life After Life, Kate Atkinson

  • Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology, Jim Al-Khalili & Johnjoe McFadden

  • Boom Towns: Restoring the Urban American Dream, Stephen J. K. Walters

  • Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J. D. Vance

  • Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby

  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari

  • Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, ​Yuval Noah Harari

  • Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination, Adam Lashinsky

  • Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson

  • Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier

  • Exit West, Mohsin Hamid

  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond

  • The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee

  • Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Nick Bostrom

  • The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy

  • Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Phil Knight

  • Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency, James Andrew Miller

  • Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, Richard Davenport-Hines

  • Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance

  • The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, Kevin Kelly

  • Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond, Gideon Rachman

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