According to Fortune, top executives including IBM’s chief commercial officer Rob Thomas spend significant time on reading as a strategic discipline, with Thomas dedicating two to three hours each morning to books spanning biographies, history, technology, and sports. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett estimates he spends 80% of his working day reading, while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously launched a personal book club in 2015 committing to a new title every two weeks. The pattern among these leaders reveals three strategic reading categories: strategy and systems thinking for better decision-making, leadership and psychology for understanding human behavior, and biographies connecting business to broader human experience. Most executives treat reading like training, blocking specific time slots including 30-60 minutes before work begins and reserving flights for deeper material.
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The Unautomateable Cognitive Edge
What makes reading particularly valuable in today’s AI-dominated business landscape is precisely what makes it difficult to automate: the development of integrative thinking. While AI excels at pattern recognition within defined datasets, human reading cultivates the ability to connect disparate domains—historical patterns with current market conditions, psychological insights with team management, technological trends with strategic planning. This cross-domain synthesis represents a fundamental competitive advantage that algorithms cannot replicate. When Buffett reads extensively across industries and time periods, he’s not just gathering information—he’s building mental models that allow him to see connections others miss.
Strategic Implications for Leadership Development
The reading habits of successful executives reveal a crucial insight about leadership development in the digital age: breadth matters as much as depth. While technical expertise remains valuable, the ability to draw from multiple domains creates more resilient decision-making frameworks. This explains why Zuckerberg’s reading challenge spanned globalization to belief systems rather than focusing exclusively on technology. Companies that recognize this are already shifting their executive development programs away from narrow functional training toward broader intellectual development, understanding that the most valuable insights often emerge from unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields.
Building Reading Cultures in the AI Era
Forward-thinking organizations are beginning to institutionalize these reading practices, recognizing that individual executive habits should scale to organizational capabilities. The most innovative companies are creating structured reading programs that mirror the personal disciplines of successful leaders—dedicated time blocks, curated reading lists across multiple domains, and forums for discussing cross-disciplinary insights. This represents a strategic counter-movement to the fragmentation of attention caused by digital communication, creating organizational spaces for deep, sustained thinking that complements rather than competes with AI tools. The companies that master this balance will develop leadership benches with both technological fluency and human wisdom.
The Future of Executive Development
As AI handles increasingly complex analytical tasks, the human advantage shifts toward contextual intelligence and judgment—precisely the capabilities developed through disciplined reading. The executives profiled aren’t just reading for information acquisition; they’re practicing a form of cognitive training that builds the mental muscles needed for strategic foresight and nuanced decision-making. This suggests a fundamental rethinking of how we prepare future leaders: rather than focusing exclusively on technical skills or business acumen, the most effective development programs will cultivate the reading habits and intellectual curiosity that enable leaders to navigate complexity and make connections across domains.
