What I know about successful people is this: They love to devour books to expand their minds. Bill Gates has stated that he reads about 50 books a year. Mark Zuckerberg? About 24 books a year.
But the undisputed king of reading remains Warren Buffett, who spends 80 percent of his day reading. Someone once asked Buffett the key to success. He pointed to a stack of books and explained: “Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”
Taking Buffet’s advice, below is a list of the most compelling books that the world’s top CEOs read in 2017. Sources for this list include Forbes, Mckinsey & Company, Gates Notes and Bloomberg.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft
The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui (2017)
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond (2016)
Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens, by Eddie Izzard (2017)
The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil (2017)
Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson (2017)
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (2017)
Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2016)
Dan Schulman, President & CEO, PayPal
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella (2017)
Doug McMillon, CEO, Wal-Mart Stores
The Content Trap by Bharat Anand (2016)
Karen Katz, President and CEO, Neiman Marcus Group
The Man Who Could Be King by John Miller (2017)
Drew Houston, CEO, Dropbox
The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen (2016)
Jamie Dimon, CEO, JPMorgan Chase
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2015)
Brad Smith, CEO, Intuit
Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman (2016)
Jeff Jones, former President Uber and EVP/CMO, Target
Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight (2016)
Tom Naratil, President, Wealth Management Americas / UBS Group
Attitude: Develop a Winning Mindset on and off the Court by Jay Wright (2017)
Andrew Liveris, CEO, the Dow Chemical Company
Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder by Arianna Huffington (2015)
Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, Goldman Sachs
Grant by Grant Ron Chernow (2017)
Jes Staley, CEO, Barclays
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella (2017)