We were standing at a lake on a summer evening, overlooking the water after a hard day’s work between team dynamics, strategy and org development. One of my clients asked me what I was reading these days.

I said Klara and the Sun.

Which was true. But it was also a safe bet: My client runs a global robotics company, and Klara and the Sun is a novel about a humanoid artificial friend… I knew the answer would land.

On the way home I thought about all the other books I didn’t mention. Two of them would have made me sound serious about the world. Two of them would have made me sound like I’d been taking drugs.

None of these are business books. What they have in common is that each one knocked something loose — a curveball that made me think differently about intelligence, about change, about what's actually real.

So here's the full list.

Every AI-conversation right now measures machine intelligence against human intelligence — is it closer, or further, or catching up, or even falling short? What's really unique?

These two books take a completely different approach. Neither was written into the current wave of hype and doom, so neither is arguing a position in it, and that's what makes them worth reading right now. Ishiguro writes from the perspective of another consciousness, trying to understand human nature. Godfrey-Smith finds an intelligent being that already exists on this planet, in the water, with eight arms and a distributed nervous system, and retraces an evolutionary path completely different from ours.

Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro
I picked this one up literally at a train station, on the way down to Munich. It’s told from the perspective of an artificial friend, a machine that watches human beings very closely and draws its own conclusions about what they are doing and why. Ishiguro never explains what Klara is or isn’t. He just leaves you with her observations and lets you work out how much of what she notices is more accurate than what the humans around her notice.

Other Minds — Peter Godfrey-Smith
This one was a birthday gift from my colleague Eli. It explores the evolution of octopuses and the hypothesis that they are sentient beings with an awareness that split off from ours so early in the evolutionary tree that it barely shares a starting point. I found that fascinating — a study on how minds and intelligence can develop without being modelled on human intelligence.

Over the last two years I’ve read a lot of books from change makers. Only two really stuck with applicability for leaders.

Empathie und Widerstand — Kristina Lunz

Lunz started in feminism and her work has evolved into activism more generally. Her argument is that activism has to be constructive or it won’t create lasting change, and the title is the whole thing: you need empathy combined with resistance. If you only share empathy, people will walk all over you. If all you have to offer is opposition, you'll just alienate people around you — sadly, those are the people that you are probably trying to reach because you want to make a change in the world, and not just get additional nods from the people you've already convinced.

It’s a short, personal book: don’t go in expecting an analysis of activism. Go in expecting someone working out her own positions in front of you. I found it refreshing.

Moral Ambition — Rutger Bregman

This is the only book on this list I listened to as an audiobook, so I can’t promise the paper version is the same experience.

I’ve been increasingly focused on working with the defining leaders of my generation.

By that I mean leaders who recognise that their impact reaches outside the sphere where they first succeeded — artists who become business people, business people who become politicians, politicians who turn out to be novelists. There are more of them than there used to be. But ambition on its own doesn’t produce anything. You need a sense of direction, and that direction has to be informed by a moral compass.
What I love about this book is that Bregman takes apart the myth of the heroic changemaker who follows a noble cause and somehow still has time to spare. He profiles the obsessive, dysfunctional, overbearing nature of what it means to devote yourself to a cause and do whatever it takes. I find that inspiring, because it’s what I actually see in the people I work with — not only in the business leaders who stay inside their business, but in the ones who are making a dent in the world.

Neither book spends any time convincing you that something needs to change. Both start after that. Lunz is about how you conduct yourself so the change survives contact with other people. Bregman is about what pursuing it does to you.

The last time I read a book where reading it felt like taking drugs was Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, back in school. These two brought that back.

Utopia Avenue — David Mitchell

No substances involved on my end. Mitchell chronicles a band — how they form, how they become successful, how the success derails them. Drugs, delusion, and take hold. Towards the end you don’t know whether what you’re reading is the experience the characters are going through, or what they’re imagining, or whether they’re just in a haze. It was gripping. As a musician, I love these stories even when they’re fictional.

Yesteryear — Caro Claire Burke

I picked this one up from my wife’s stack of books — only to find out afterward that it had been making the rounds. No drugs here, but certainly delusion and insanity, set in a very topical scene of influencers, the manosphere and gender roles. It got my head spinning, especially towards the end. Quite the ride. Worth knowing before you start: it goes hard at coercive control and what happens to the children of people who “perform” their family online.

Six books, none of them about leadership, but rather about seeing something you weren't set up to see. That's how I curated this list.

What are you reading that's doing that to you? Just reply — I'll read it.

Yours,

P.S. If you have some spare time, go to an actual bookstore. Not the tab you already have open — the kind with a door! Then do the thing that makes it worth the trip: ask for one of these books, and ask what else you should be reading in that vein. Booksellers wait all day for that question.

I'd love to know what you are reading and why. And — if you’d indulge me — let me know if you’d like more of these kind of posts! Just reply to this email.