The business of reading
January 26, 2012 
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One of my resolutions for the year is to read more fiction. I wish I could say that this is a response to a relentless focus on seminal business non-fiction works in 2011. Rather, it’s a response to a growing amount of time following the fire hose of links that appear on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
These sources have a lot going for them. But by 31st December 2012, it would be good to have more tangible evidence of having read ‘stuff’. And as a fan of all things digital, an e-book at 100% completion is as tangible as it’s going to get. So armed with the Kindle app on my iPad/Phone, I’m making steady progress through a growing electronic pile of books.
The following HBR article, on the benefits of fiction was therefore timely.
To bring the subject home, think about how many different people you interact with during the course of a given day — coworkers, clients, passing strangers, store clerks. Then think about how much effort you devoted to thinking about their emotional state or the emotional quality of your interaction. It’s when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavor of alternate worlds of experience. Right now, I’m in the middle of Irene Nemirovsky’s posthumously published novel about France’s fall to the Nazis in 1940. Her simple sentences sketch a sense of uncertainty, moral ambiguity, and heartbreak — feelings I certainly wouldn’t want to dwell on in “real” life, but emotions I’m better off for having taken the time to consider.
But nourishing empathy doesn’t require such grimness. And if you want your diet of fiction, as it’s shaping your mind to be more emotionally acute, to be specifically relevant to work, there is a body of great literature about business and organizational behavior.
Read the full thing here.
For all the talk of reforming MBA curriculums, I think it’ll be a while before we see a module on the merits of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. (Reading a 10 page case can be painful enough….) So for now, this fiction-reading project is firmly in the bucket of extracurricular activities.
