Skip the Abstract, Read Deep!
In the business world, the idea of “literacy” is often taken for granted. We like to think we know what we’re looking at, that we’re in touch with our customers, and up-to-date on trends. But we often judge a book by its cover, and that is often not good enough.
Worse, perhaps, is that in business reading is reduced to absorbing information. Services such as Blinkist and GetAbstract have fueled an optimized, hyper-efficient reading culture that is rewarded for reducing books to mere “key takeaways,” avoiding cognitive dissonance and more complex truths. When Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg boast how many books they can read in one week, they and other “professional readers” ignore the most important benefit of reading: it is not learning, but rather forgetting what we know.
Last week, at the CogX festival, I had the great pleasure of interviewing MIT professor and bestselling author Sherry Turkle, and we spoke about the correlation between empathy and ethics, her recent memoir The Empathy Diaries, and the need to “reclaim conversation in a digital age,” to cite one of her previous books. Turkle bemoaned the loss we face when we rely increasingly on digital technology to replace our social interactions. She told me she was unimpressed by the “fake empathy” of chatbots like Woebot (an AI-based therapist) or other examples of social robotics and so-called Emotion AI. “True empathy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is inherently human,” she insisted.
This is what books help us do. Reading rewires our brain, a product of a phenomenon called neuroplasticity that describes our brain as malleable and ever-evolving in response to our experiences. Neuroplasticity is the foundation for a change of perspective, for true empathy. It is what makes us human, one could argue. But it does require deep reading, not just skimming.
The whole point of reading is thus reading, and how we read. There is a direct line from deep reading to empathy to embracing views, values, and ideologies that are different from our own. To overcome polarization and heal divides, we don’t all need to read the same book, but it is critical we all read.
This is the argument that Maryanne Wolf, one of the world’s leading scholars on literacy and the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, so passionately presented in our Living Room Session last week. In conversation with my colleague Megan Hustad (watch the full recording below) she made the case for “literacy as a human right.”
And while that is compelling and profound, literacy is now also a feature—and soon a right?—of AI. There is dispute over how well AI can actually read, but the fact of the matter is that automated or augmented reading by machines will increasingly replace human reading. And AI is not just the new reader, but also the new writer on the block. Microsoft’s Xiaoice chatbot, for example, has learned to write poetry and short stories, and for its more than 660 million users, these texts are often the literature most integral to their daily lives. And then there are the algorithms that infiltrate our lives through social media platforms like TikTok. They require a new form of literacy while also presenting a chance to become more literate on issues of identity, race, and gender, as my colleague Monika Jiang argues further below.
“External technologies transform us. They transform us at a physiological level, at a psychological level, and at a social-emotional level,” Wolf observed. How can we teach algorithms to develop empathy? Should we? Maryanne Wolf said she is hopeful that if we manage to “combine the imagination of the artist with the beautiful intelligence in our technologies, we will never lose what makes us uniquely human, whatever we create.”
Citing the moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum, she laid out the consequences of failure: “It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others.”
Deep reading is beautiful business. Take time for it; the whole world depends on it.
—Tim Leberecht
Photo by Su Shenliang: Library hotel in Qunglongwu, Zhejiang, China
Literacy is deep processing: a conversation with Maryanne Wolf
In last week’s Living Room Session on A More Literate World, we enjoyed hosting scholar and teacher Maryanne Wolf, one of the world’s leading experts in neurosciences and dyslexia research. She is the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA in Los Angeles, and the recipient of multiple research and teaching honors. Wolf has also authored several books, including Proust and the Squid, Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century, and most recently Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.
Watch the full session
15 questions
iPad, Kindle, or print?
Can you remember the last novel you read?
Can you remember the first book you loved?
Is “bestselling” a mark of quality or groupthink?
Can you be both well-read and naive?
Can you talk about books you haven’t read?
What would be the title of your book?
How many of the books you read do you finish?
Who is your book?
What one book do you wish everyone on your team had read?
What is leadership if not finding the right words?
What is collaboration if not speaking the same language?
What is business if not a fiction that comes true?
Which type of literacy do you wish you had more of?
Do you have a library card?
Photo by SeARCH and Iwan: Khalifeyah Library, Muharraq, Bahrain
10 non-business books that businesspeople should read
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (1977)
The final work of one of Brazil’s greatest novelists, whose style is often compared to Borges, Pessoa, and Kafka. It tells the story of a typist who lives in the Rio slums and is a timely guide for people in the business of shaping identities through stories.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (1929)
The definitive epistolary novel about the art of life as a high-wire act of becoming who we are. It features the famous line (evermore relevant in times of liminal leadership): “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart…live in the question.”
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
It’s the source of this evergreen line, apropos of toxic consumerists and reckless tech founders everywhere: “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
The Gift by Lewis Hyde (1983)
“The best book I have read on what it means to be an artist in today’s economic world.” —Video artist Bill Viola
“The main assumption of the book is that certain spheres of life, which we care about, are not well organized by the marketplace. That includes artistic practice, which is what the book is mostly about, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing and teaching.” —Lewis Hyde
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)
A novel about an employee who really doesn’t like his boss, to put it mildly.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
A novel about an employee who esteems his boss too much.
We Are All Birds of Uganda by Hafsa Zayyan (2021)
Zayyan, the winner of the inaugural Merky Books New Writers’ Prize, explores racial tensions against the backdrop of Idi Amin’s expulsion of thousands of people of South Asian heritage from Uganda in 1972. The Guardian praised the “modern, multi-ethnic vision of masculinity” she presented.
(For more such novelistic recommendations, check out Ella Berthoud’s The Novel Cure. Or book a one-on-one personal bibliotherapy session with Ella.)
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
What is work life like for those who wait on tables, clean strangers’ homes, and stock big-box retail shelves? Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich aimed to find out for herself, and the result is this now-classic work on working hard for little money.
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker (2018)
How we gather matters, claims conflict facilitator Priya Parker. Here she invites us to view leadership—in business and beyond, IRL and online—as the ability to gather meaningfully, from the daily meeting to the town hall to the holiday party.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown (2017)
A poetic and practical book about radical social change. maree brown, an American author, doula, and Black feminist, presents her “emergent strategy.” Also recommended: Pleasure Activism (2020), in which she proposes pleasure as a key agent of change.
Photo by Ossip van Duivenbode: A converted locomative hall LocHal in Tilburg, The Netherlands
10 business books that are actually worth reading (even for non-businesspeople)
Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown (1962)
It’s about more than the office, obviously. Gurley Brown, later the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, offers a glimpse into what the Mad Men era was like for women in the office.
On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors by Patrick Wright (1979)
Aside from having a great title, it’s a fascinating account of a talented engineer and executive—John DeLorean, whose 1981 DMC-12 model was made famous by the film Back to the Future—wrestling with the corporate bureaucracy that blighted the U.S. auto industry.
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2000)
Overexposed, often incorrectly cited, but a hit for the right reasons; Gladwell’s first bestseller is well told and full of sticky ideas.
Ethical Ambition by Derrick Bell (2002)
With courage it’s possible to obtain and maintain success without selling out your values, argues law professor Bell. His account of rising to challenging occasions is both inspiring and validating.
Radical Candor by Kim Scott (2017)
Vague, distant feedback is for cowards and the unkind, Scott explains. Instead she proposes caring personally and challenging directly.
It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden (2003)
A slim, compact devotional for creatives and knowledge economy freelancers.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (2014)
Founder and now venture capitalist Horowitz demystifies startup life.
The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull (1969)
If you’ve ever wondered how hierarchical organizations are riddled with incompetence, you may find an answer here. “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” is the essence, and the authors make an entertaining (if snarky) case.
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
The original and still the sharpest primer on office politics, sales, and any situation where you have to deal with humans.
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (2011)
With this hugely influential book, House Resident and Concrete Love contributor Susan Cain started her Quiet Revolution and exposed the “Extrovert Ideal” that has permeated our business culture for decades as a flawed myth. Workplace culture has never been the same again.
Photo by Wikimedia Commons: Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Ciudad de México, Mexico
But do you have to read the whole book?
Users of apps like GetAbstract and Blinkist, which offer executive summaries of nonfiction titles that can be consumed in under 15 minutes, might say no. Reviewers of both apps point to the benefit of being able to quickly absorb a book’s key insights—or appear smart at your next meeting—and their popularity is growing.
Blinkist raised $18.8 million in funding—for a total of $35 million to date—to expand the number of titles, languages, and audio summaries it offers. GetAbstract, which offers a library of about 25,000 titles, claims to be used by more than a third of Fortune 500 companies. Does their popularity point to the end of reading?
According to Blinkist CEO Holger Seim, the answer is no. Fifty percent of Blinkist users say they read more books because of the service, and use it to decide which books to read in full. “We’re trying to inspire people and make it easier to take the first step and [engage] in literature,” Seim says.
If you want to read a quick summary of a nonfiction book, there’s always the old-fashioned way: check it out from the library and skim it yourself. (Most nonfiction books, as any veteran of the publishing industry will tell you, contain their summaries in their introductions.) Or just ask your smartest friend.
#Sheesh: work on your social media literacy
“Sheesh” has become a global trend on social media, and it all started with this frog video, though the word (“used to express disbelief and exasperation”) actually dates back to the 1950s.
Whether you knew this or not, no one can really escape social media these days. It’s our ultimate parallel reality that mirrors—painfully honestly—what’s going on and wrong in society. So if you choose to understand the world better, and yourself, there’s no way around learning how to use it—and using it more intentionally. We can’t remain passive, uninformed users of feeds constructing our reality. Instead we need to educate ourselves better on how it works, what works on it, and how we can combat the many true problems of social media, from fake news to trigger warning content. Bottom line: social media needs new business models not built on advertising. Until we’re there, let’s take a look at one of the multi-billion-dollar platforms that promise to lead a new wave of social media, maybe.
TikTok!
Before you roll your eyes and say “sheeeeesh,” hold on. There’s a reason TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platforms across 150 countries, with 1.1 billion active users who are no longer all teenagers (in fact, teenagers currently make up about a third of users). TikTok has become one of the top five platforms consumers use to follow brands, whereas only about one-third of marketers (34 percent) currently leverage the platform. Singing, acting, and dancing trends aside, although notably entertaining and arguably creativity-enhancing, there are other ways of becoming more literate through TikTok that are worth considering.
Relating to politics: Let’s face it, we’re all susceptible to the echo chamber effect, whether on social media or IRL, because it makes us feel good about ourselves. Learning how to relate to the other in order to build empathy, as Maryanne Wolf pointed out, is crucial to grow as human beings and to uphold democratic societies, particularly in regard to younger generations whose global voter turnout is trending alarmingly downwards. TikTok is helping make politics “relatable, funny, and understandable, but also more memorable,” writes Ninke Boshuizen in Medium Magazine. Given its organic content algorithm, political activists in Southeast Asia, for example, were able to reach a much wider audience range globally, amplifying protesters’ voices in Thailand and Myanmar to call for democracy and end military dictatorship.
Including minority groups: No other platform has managed to allow such an unruly mix of people the license to become creators and go viral with something they love, however weird, niche, or nerdy. For example, people with disabilities or rare diseases are much more represented in your “fyp” (“for you” page, your main feed on the app) compared to other platforms, giving people like Imani Barbarin a voice to have “uncomfortable conversations” about discrimination against people with disabilities, white supremacy, and ableism. In light of yesterday’s Juneteenth celebration, it’s also worth mentioning that creators like Kahlil Green, a history major at Yale who studies social change and social movements, are educating people about overlooked or “whitewashed” history involving the Black community. “You can make a video and millions of people can see it within a day,” he said. “That reach is something you’re not going to get anywhere else.”
Challenging beauty standards: One of the current one-billion-views trends on the platform is #midsize. Known also as in-betweeners, mid-size people have been advocating for more representation in retail, the fashion industry, and media. So far, very successfully, achieving overall positive resonance.
It’s all evidence of grassroots demand for more topics to be discussed more proactively and much more openly, and TikTok is an unparalleled facilitator in that respect. Any technology that helps us as individuals and businesses meet people where they really are can’t be wholly net negative.
Finally, if you do need one more reason to brush up your social media literacy while sticking to good old books, there’s #booktok. Just sayin’!
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