A summer reading list for the modern leader

June 12, 2023

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. Sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

A big part of my job—and perhaps the most enviable aspect of my work—is reading. I read Inc. and Fast Company online every day, along with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. To stay informed and understand how others in media are wooing audiences, I check out daily coverage from major business publications, and on weekends I try to make my way through a thick stack of publications, from The New Yorker to Runner’s World.

Alas, I typically don’t do as much reading for pure pleasure as I’d like, except in summer, when holiday weekends and leisure travel provide ample opportunities to catch up on some of the most anticipated books of the year so far. All of them offer leadership lessons—or warnings on how not tolead—or insights on the human condition. Here’s what’s on my summer reading list:

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams

Unscripted offers a deeply reported account of the greed, drama, and misconduct that pervaded the final years at Sumner Redstone’s media companies, CBS and Viacom. If the excerpt that ran in a February issue of The New York Times is any indication, this critically acclaimed book will offer plenty of examples of bad business decisions and unseemly behavior by entrenched insiders. I hope the book shows how “independent” directors and outside investigators came to protect Les Moonves, the former CEO of CBS accused of multiple incidents of sexual harassment or assault, instead of standing up for shareholders and employees.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by Charles Grann

Grann’s book explores the story of the Wager, a British naval warship that ran aground off the coast of Chile in 1741. The Wager was probably doomed from the start—the Navy forced aged and infirm soldiers to serve on the ship and others in the fleet—but I’m interested to learn about her haughty captain and the conditions that led some of her crew to revolt.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

I wake up every morning thinking about web traffic to Inc. and Fast Company’s sites, so this book is a bit of a busman’s holiday for me. In Smith’s account, two very different entrepreneurs, Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed and Nick Denton of Gawker, helped fuel the media’s obsession with equating page views with success. I’m eager to read how Smith, who was editor of Buzzfeed News and a respected New York Times media columnist before launching news site Semafor, covers a phenomenon he helped create.

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Desmond, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, makes the case for how wealthy Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep their fellow citizens impoverished. His previous book, Evicted, shows how lack of affordable housing contributes greatly to poverty, and in Poverty,he expands his lens to include predatory lending and low-paying jobs. Desmond’s book promises to hold up a mirror to business leaders who claim to care about income inequality.

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

I’m not going to pretend I’m reading Romantic Comedy—set at an SNL-like late night sketch show—for management tips. But Sittenfeld, who wrote for Fast Company before finding fame as a novelist, is a keen observer of the workplace, and reviews indicate that the plot hinges on the double standards women still experience on the job. (For a sampling of Sittenfeld’s business journalism, check out her 2000 profile of Samuel Mockbee, whose Rural Studio aims to provide affordable, dignified housing.)

What’s on your nightstand?

I’m always looking for book recommendations! Please send the name of your book of the summer, along with a few sentences on what drew you to the title, to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. We’ll share reader picks next week.

A summer reading list for the modern leader

What’s on your nightstand?

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