How to be a winner: the books that inspire Mark Zuckerberg and other high flyers
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Version 0 of 1. Ever wondered why neither you nor I are world leaders or sitting pretty atop the rich lists of either Forbes magazine or the Sunday Times? Most likely it’s because we are reading the wrong books. Here is an example of what I mean. For Christmas, I got Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop, her fictional account of a sympathetic but undeniably mousy and entrepreneurially inept woman trying to establish the eponymous business in a dismal-sounding Suffolk seaside town but failing in the face of ruthless local opposition – not to mention poltergeists who may or may not be loosening the screws to her bookshelves. This sort of defeatist stuff may have got its late author shortlisted for the Booker, but it’s functionally useless if we want to be, as we must in 2015, masters of the universe. No, what we need to read is the kind of book recommended by Mark Zuckerberg this week. The Facebook CEO has just set himself a challenge, to read a book a week in 2015 and has set up a web page, as a kind of online book club, where he will discuss the improving volumes he reads. “I’m excited for my reading challenge,” he says. “I’ve found reading books very intellectually fulfilling. Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today.” Deeper, cynics might suggest, than going to a Facebook friend’s page and liking their pix of Christmas puddings. The first book Zuckerberg is reading is one that all kinds of movers and shakers have read to help them be the best they can be, or even better than that. It is just one example of the kind of books the rich and powerful are recommending to one another, and that you and I should be reading in 2015 if we want to run the world, boss (rather than occupy) Wall Street, be so money that we can chillax at our very own guitar-shaped pool so big it can be seen from the International Space Station, justify the (non-)invasion of Crimea or at the very least help the Lib Dems avoid general election disaster. Here, then, is your 2015 reading list. The End of Power by Moisés Naím Despite Naím’s mouthful of a sub-heading (From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States – Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be), this is the book that Zuckerberg thinks he needs to read first in 2015. Why? “It’s a book that explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organisations,” he says. “The trend towards giving people more power is one I believe in deeply, and I’m looking forward to reading this book and exploring this in more detail.” In the book, Naím explains that “power is the ability to direct or prevent the current or future actions of other groups and individuals”, and that disruptive newcomers such as Alexander the Great or Steve Jobs, Johannes (not Steve) Gutenberg or perhaps Sir James Dyson, he of the game-changing Airblade, can dramatically rearrange the distribution of power (as can natural disasters such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, but that’s a different story). Naim even captures the funky anti-party political zeitgeist with this remark: “Politics was always the art of the compromise, but now politics is downright frustrating – sometimes it feels like the art of nothing at all.” Suck on that, Cameron (one can imagine Clegg saying as he underlines the passage crossly). No wonder Zuckerberg hasn’t (yet) sought election to political office. In such an era, what Naím calls micro power may be more covetable for those of you who have made a New Year resolution to go megalomaniac on an unsuspecting world. In choosing this book, Zuckerberg follows ex-US president Bill Clinton, who liked The End of Power so much that he recommended it to Nick Clegg. Or at least that’s what Clegg told his listeners on an LBC 97.3 phone-in in 2013, adding that it was not he but his wife, Miriam González Durántez, who followed up on Clinton’s recommendation and actually bought the book. It’s not clear if Clegg has read The End of Power, but if the Lib Dems crash and burn come May’s general election, that could be one reason why. The Wine of Wisdom: the Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam Are you the president of an expanding post-Soviet empire who likes to hunt bears and other wildlife with big guns, ideally while half naked? Damn straight you aren’t. Vladimir Putin is, though, and one reason is because he reads the right kind of books. Yes, the president admires the great classics of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but he also cites the Persian polymath’s poems as giving him succour, quite possibly during the tricky moments when he is on the receiving end of EU sanctions and international frownings. “My wife has recently given me a great present: Omar Khayyam’s poems,” said President Putin. “It helps me in many difficult situations. I recommend you to buy this book.” But why do the poems of a 12th-century Sufi mystic appeal to such a 21st-century potentate? Quite possibly because his most renowned verses meditate on the call to religion, the temporary nature of all things and the immediacy of death – and perhaps by their suggestion, here captured in the influential translation from Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward Fitzgerald, that power lies within us not in some transcendental realm: I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return’d to me, And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell” Omar Khayyam’s verses have also been cited as inspirational by Dee Hock, founder of the Visa credit card. Hock kept a copy open on his desk to warn him of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune. A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen Sheryl Sandberg, who is COO of Facebook, recommended Anna Quindlen’s self-help book – quite a tribute, given that Sandberg herself is the author of a self-help book for women seeking to break through the glass ceiling, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sandberg told the New York Times that her well-thumbed copy is somewhere in a pile of books on her nightstand. “I’ve read it before – and I will read it again – and just knowing it’s at my bedside gives me comfort.” Reportedly, she especially likes the following quote from the book: “But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart.” Very good point, but, to my mind, not a quote that addresses the world’s slouches. Really, Quindlen should have added a remark personally relevant to me: “Not just your life sitting gainfully unemployed in your pants eating pop tarts while watching Loose Women, you oaf.” Business Adventures by John Brooks I know what you’re thinking – isn’t the title an oxymoron? But this collection of journalist John Brooks’ New Yorker articles from the 1960s is weirder than that. The book, recommended by both Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and stock market maven Warren Buffet, was long out of print until last summer, when the fact that it had been read by and admired by two of the world’s leading masters of the universe went public. Gates went so far as to say it “remains the best business book I have ever read”. Gates eulogised Business Adventures in the Wall Street Journal: “Brooks’s deeper insights about business are just as relevant today as they were back then,” he wrote. “Unlike a lot of today’s business writers, Brooks didn’t boil his work down into pat how-to lessons or simplistic explanations for success. (How many times have you read that some company is taking off because they give their employees free lunch?) You won’t find any listicles in his work. Brooks wrote long articles that frame an issue, explore it in depth, introduce a few compelling characters and show how things went for them.” Gates cited as an example how Brooks wrote about Ford’s Edsel fiasco as refuting why Ford’s flagship car was such a historic flop. It wasn’t because the car was overly poll-tested; it was because Ford’s executives only pretended to be acting on what the polls said. “Although the Edsel was supposed to be advertised, and otherwise promoted, strictly on the basis of preferences expressed in polls, some old-fashioned snake-oil selling methods, intuitive rather than scientific, crept in.” It certainly didn’t help that the first Edsels “were delivered with oil leaks, sticking hoods, trunks that wouldn’t open and push buttons that … couldn’t be budged with a hammer”. Gates revealed that he read Business Adventures only because a copy was lent to him by Warren Buffet in 1991. “Warren, if you’re reading this, I still have your copy,” wrote Gates. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene This 1998 book by the popular psychology writer sold 1.2m copies in the US alone and reportedly remains one of the most requested books in American prison libraries, still some way ahead of Little Women and More Tales from the City, I believe. More importantly for our purposes, lots of successful and borderline intimidating multi-platform hip-hop celebrities have drawn succour from its frankly hectoring, Machiavelli-lite injunctions (for example, law 3: “Conceal your intentions”; law 15: “Crush your enemy totally”). DJ Premier, for instance, has a tattoo inspired by law 5 (“Reputation is the cornerstone of power”) on his arm, while DJ Calvin Harris has a tattoo based on law 28 (“Enter with boldness”) somewhere on his body. The book has been mentioned in songs by Jay Z, Kanye West and UGCK, while Fidel Castro reportedly read the book. Most significantly, Curtis Jackson (AKA rapper 50 Cent) was so impressed by the book’s laws that he approached Greene with the idea of a collaboration. The result, The 50th Law by 50 Cent and Robert Greene, which restated much of the earlier volume’s philosophy, using key moments from the former drug dealer’s life to dramatise its points, became a bestseller, despite – or possibly because of – my typically snarky, weedy liberal’s Guardian review. True, some critics poured scorn on The 48 Laws (“Intending the opposite, Greene has actually produced one of the best arguments since the New Testament for humility and obscurity,” reckoned Newsweek’s critic), but Dov Charney, founder and CEO of American Apparel, apparently quotes the laws during board meetings and has given friends and employees copies of the book. None of which makes his clothing range any more wearable, but still. The Art of War by Sun Tzu Remember Dien Bien Phu? Of course you don’t. The 1954 battle between the French colonial forces and communist nationalist Viet Minh is, nonetheless, relevant here because the Vietnamese who fought against the French at Dien Bien Phu and later ousted invading Americans were led by soldiers steeped in the book written by a Chinese general who lived, some historians reckon, between 544 and 496 BC, and so before some of you were born. By contrast, so far as I understand the Vietnamese conflict, the French were intellectually dulled by listening to endless Edith Piaf and the Americans by playing air guitar to Jimi Hendrix while off their nuts on LSD. As a result of these unexpected military reverses, this book has become a must-read for modern military strategists (even though Sun Tzu wrote about chariots rather than drones), the KGB and also for business thinkers who have applied his martial philosophy to the war that is modern capitalism. Indeed, the book has become essential to western business leaders, not only if they want to – as they must – understand their new Chinese masters, but also if they want to get ahead in their chosen field. Hence, only recently, the US business bible Forbes magazine printed 31 tips culled from Sun Tzu’s classic. Among them are the following, which are so freighted with topical relevance it’s not even funny. For instance: “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.” (Is it just me who is thinking about two world wars, not to mention the protracted allied campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq?) Or: “Treat your men as you would your own beloved sons. And they will follow you into the deepest valley.” (Rather than, say, putting them on zero-hour contracts or leaking their imminent mass redundancy on Christmas Eve.) And my personal favourite advice from Sun Tzu: “Move swift as the Wind and closely formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still as the Mountain. And don’t forget to have a proper breakfast first.” I made up the last sentence, but I don’t think Sun Tzu would have disagreed. Truly, if you want to be a player in 2015, you must read, among others, a book written more than two millennia ago. |