It’s not surprising that the books Harvard Business School faculty are reading this summer keep returning to artificial intelligence, since the technology evokes so many big questions: How do humans fit in when robots can do some—if not most—things? Where does rapid technological change leave writing, thinking, and leading? And how do we tend to ourselves and our relationships when distractions tempt us everywhere?
Yet the summer reading choices of faculty also betray a longing to slow down and savor the season with mysteries and old-fashioned comedy. (Who knew Moby-Dick author Herman Melville could be funny?)
In a fast-paced world where a Stanford teen’s college newspaper investigation can take down the university’s president and malware can steal ideas and identities in seconds, faculty suggest escaping into a reading list grounded in handwritten letters and the sound of the sea.
Jeff Bussgang: Back to basics
I recommend The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
An epistolary novel about an octogenarian woman’s relationships hardly seems like natural reading for an AI-focused venture capitalist and professor. But the book pulled me in—and reminded me that in an age of AI-generated everything, long-form handwritten correspondence may become the ultimate personal touch.
Jeffrey J. Bussgang is a senior lecturer of business administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit.
DJ DiDonna: Creativity and genius
In the last months of putting the finishing touches on my book, Big Time Off: The Transformative Power of Sabbaticals and How to Take One, I’ve been zooming out to think about creativity and to wonder if I have another book in me (now that I’ve forgotten how difficult it was). Rick Rubin, the cofounder of Def Jam Records, has accompanied me during this reflection with his meditations in The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
The Creative Act is a minimalist entry to the rich tradition of books on writing, spanning from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way to Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, and Stephen King’s On Writing. As anyone who has embarked on an enormous creative project knows, an essential part of the journey is distracting yourself by reading about how to do it. Though Rubin doesn’t cover much new territory that his predecessors missed, it’s a beautiful book (physically—get the hardcover!) and a great philosophical examination of the craft.
Even if you don’t feel obligated to read about AI this summer, the reclusive Chilean author Benjamín Labatut’s exploration of how genius and technological innovations arise and collide is well worth the read. The Maniac covers a span of technological innovation connecting mathematician John von Neumann in the nuclear age to Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeat of Go master Lee Sedol. Labatut writes with increasing fictionalization of the historical characters as the book progresses, making for a unique interpretation of technological development and the role of genius.
DJ DiDonna is a senior lecturer of business administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit.
Trevor Fetter: A relationship tested in open water
My wife owns the bookshop in our neighborhood of Beacon Hill in Boston, so I’m never at a loss for suggestions and inventory, and I can easily obtain a book faster than from a certain online bookseller.
With the arrival of summer, I always return to non-fiction books about the sea. Next up is a book that my wife has put on the top of my stack: A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst. Apparently, it has more to do with relationships than seamanship, but it’s a true and fascinating story of survival in one of my favorite settings, the open ocean.
Most recently, I read Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick. This should be required for anyone living in Boston in America’s 250th year.
Also in the queue: Structured Empowerment: How to Achieve Growth While Promoting Agility by my HBS colleague, Professor Tatiana Sandino. I know there are lessons in it that will be useful in the companies on whose boards I sit and in my wife’s growing bookstore business.
Trevor Fetter is a senior lecturer in the Accounting and Management Unit.
Mattias Fibiger: From financial crises to light-hearted fun
Idiosyncratic and iconoclastic, Michael Pettis’ The Volatility Machine blends corporate finance, macroeconomic theory, and economic history to explain the recurrence of financial crises across the centuries. I’ve found myself returning to this book, which should be regarded as a modern classic, in our own era of economic turbulence.
Having slogged my way through Moby-Dick (with apologies to the fans), I was reluctant to pick up another Herman Melville book. But The Confidence-Man, Melville’s last, is a hilarious and profound meditation on trust, markets, and more. I haven’t laughed so hard reading a book since Confederacy of Dunces. And it is, mercifully, shorter than Moby-Dick.
Mattias E. Fibiger is the William A. Sahlman Associate Professor of Business Administration.
Laura Jakli: The impact of reality TV
I just finished two books—one for a general audience, the other more academic.
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth covers the rapid evolution of the cyberweapons market. The book is structured around various "zero-day" exploits, which are software flaws that allow hackers access to sensitive systems, including critical state infrastructure (e.g., power grids). The author details the roles of countries, tech companies, criminal organizations, and rogue hackers in using these weapons to launch high-profile attacks like the Stuxnet worm and the WannaCry ransomware attack. It gave me a sense of the increasingly far-reaching effects of cyberwarfare.
The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy by political scientist Eunji Kim examines how ostensibly “apolitical” entertainment media shapes politics and public opinion. The author uses a range of methods to examine these effects. In one experiment, Kim drove a truck around to recruit people to watch clips from rags-to-riches reality shows and examine how exposure to this content affected their beliefs on upward mobility. It reframed how I think about entertainment media as a vehicle for political socialization.
Laura V. Jakli is an assistant professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy unit.
Geoffrey Jones: Finding inspiration in the physical world
I have been reading and plan to finish over the summer Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? The book takes readers on journeys along rivers in Canada, Ecuador, and India and makes the case that rivers are living things and not just resources for human beings, and should be recognized as such in law. At a time when concerns about the environment seem to be slipping from many people’s priorities, this enchanting book is a reminder of how all life is interconnected, and of our responsibilities to preserve and protect our planet.
The Chinese tech company Huawei is usually in the headlines when governments accuse it of security risk. I saw another side of the company last year when I visited its extraordinary research campus outside Shenzhen. The 300-acre site is built around replicas of 108 buildings from European cities including Bologna, Budapest, Granada, Oxford, and Paris, and houses 30,000 researchers. My summer reading is Eva Dou’s House of Huawei, which has a photo of the campus on its cover, to try to understand how this firm has become both China’s most successful tech firm, and one with the ambition and imagination to build a magical workplace to drive world-class innovation.
Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Strauss Professor of Business History.
Josh Lerner: Knowledge in AI times
A recent book that I very much enjoyed is The Infinite Alphabet: And the Laws of Knowledge by César Hidalgo. He looks at the process by which knowledge forms and shapes across economies, a topic particularly relevant in this AI era. The many mini-cases that he features are thought-provoking and surprising. While the discussion draws on insights from economics, history, and sociology, among other perspectives, the book is super readable.
Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking.
Tony Mayo: Detective stories and self-help
One of the books that I am finally reading this summer is Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s Immunity to Change. Maybe it’s my own immunity to change that has prevented me from reading it before now, but I am excited to explore their approach to helping individuals better understand what gets in their way of doing what they should or what they aspire to do. It’s a sharp reminder that insight isn’t the same as change, and that most of us are better at diagnosing problems than dismantling the beliefs that sustain them.
I’m also looking forward to Patricia Faison Hewlin’s Staying True to You (out in August), which explores the tension between authenticity and the pressure to conform to organizational expectations, a balance that feels increasingly relevant.
On a lighter note, I’m finishing Tana French’s Cal Hooper trilogy. It follows a retired Chicago cop who heads to rural Ireland in search of peace and solitude and instead finds anything but. His detective instincts resurface as he’s drawn into a series of mysteries lurking beneath the surface of a close-knit but quietly complicated community.
Anthony Mayo is the Thomas S. Murphy Senior Lecturer of Business Administration.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter: A deep dive in democracy
The summer of 2026 marks the 250th birthday of the United States, just when the future of American democracy is challenged by pressing questions domestically and globally.
These include: Is the US economy built on the rule of law, and can business leaders enjoy sufficient stability to plan? Can private institutions control their own affairs, whether higher education or law firms? What is the role of the public sector in fulfilling societal needs that affect the private sector, such as workforce development or affordable housing? What is the reputation and brand value of American enterprises?
Looking back at the past provides grounding for the future. In Democracy Awakening, historian Heather Cox Richardson shows that democracy has always been filled with conflict. By illuminating events and players that shaped and challenged the meaning and boundaries of democracy, she parses the meanings of conservative and liberal. Harvard Professor Jill Lepore, in her prizewinning book We the People, provides an absorbing history of the US Constitution as both foundational and a work in progress through the amendments process. Lepore offers novelistic drama of real people making strategic and ethical decisions, just as though they were protagonists in HBS cases.
Speaking of HBS cases, historical figures are literally case protagonists in HBS colleague David Moss’s book, Democracy: A Case Study. This 784-page book might be too heavy to carry to the beach, but it is worth dipping into. Cases enable discussion about a range of key moments in democracy, from creating the framework for the American system to whether to allow corporate money in politics or how to regulate the food industry. Just as in HBS classrooms, readers become immersed in the conflicts, debates, and significant decisions that become history. Democracy stems from informed leaders and citizens, even when they disagree.
Throughout American history, leaders and citizens have acted at the local level. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, toured the United States to understand the emerging democratic system. His book Democracy in America highlights the importance of voluntary associations in every city and region—Americans self-organizing to solve problems and improve the quality of life. Democracy is formed not just through voting but through civic action. Service and social entrepreneurship are essential ingredients.
I draw on de Tocqueville as inspiration for the concept advanced leadership that I outline in my own book, Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time. Entrepreneurship is a very American idea. It is manifested not just in for-profit growth companies but also in soul-nurturing not-for-profit initiatives. It is seen not just in stand-alone ventures but also in empowering people throughout established organizations too, to seek new ideas. A nod to de Tocqueville for reminding us of the “small d” aspect of democracy.
Democracy assumes that there is an army for change ready to spring into action to correct abuses, amend constitutions, and produce innovations that create the future. I recommend reading history this summer, not to enshrine the past in inevitability but to see it as a human creation that can be transcended by human action.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration.
Len Schlesinger: Life and leadership in the AI age
As a former college president, I am excited to turn to How to Rule the World by Theo Baker, who has just graduated from Stanford. The book covers Baker’s first-year journalistic efforts that brought down the university’s president, but, more importantly, it reflects the dramatic changes in life on elite college campuses during the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 years. It is proving to be a disturbing view of the evolving power of money and entrepreneurial ambition in undergraduate settings. These folks are soon to be in our applicant pool and must be understood.
I have regularly turned to Jim Collins’ business books over the past decades and was delighted to see him shift his sights onto the timely questions of building, sustaining, and renewing your life in What to Make of a Life. He has identified a great sample of side-by-side paired lives working their way through the decades and provides a framing that I will inevitably try on myself for size as I age. It should prove to be a deeply personal and potentially quite useful read.
Finally, as I grapple with countless intellectual questions about the development and diffusion of AI, I look forward to reading I Am Not a Robot: My Year of Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything. Former Wall Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern offers us both an entertaining and often unsettling view of the impact of AI and AI tools on our everyday lives.
Those of us who want to move beyond high-level academic arguments will benefit enormously from extrapolating from the basic impacts of AI on our everyday lives.
Leonard A. Schlesinger is a Baker Foundation Professor.
Debora Spar: Savoring every word
This summer, racing to finish writing my own book, I am also treating myself to a good pile of fiction, focusing on those writers whose words I love to read. In that category, I devoured The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It’s received a lot of buzz, and it’s entirely deserved. The book is written as a series of letters, which I usually don’t enjoy, but Evans manages to weave them into the tale of a woman’s life that is entirely plausible and completely compelling. I loved the book, I loved its grumpy protagonist, I loved the characters she encountered and affected along the way.
I also loved Stoner, a 1956 novel by John Williams. It’s a slow book about a poor boy who becomes an English professor—not the stuff of wild plot twists, but rather an exquisite story about life, and aging, and love. It’s actually referenced in The Correspondent, which made me realize that they are similar in many ways—both by great writers, who treat their characters with singular care.
Finally, I highly recommend Frog: And Other Essays, the latest book of essays by Anne Fadiman, another careful and magnificent writer. It’s funny and poignant, and Fadiman makes every word count. Since the essays are bite-sized, it’s a great beach read, too.
Debora L. Spar is the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration.
Image created with assets from Adobe Stock.
