While awaiting your flight, you notice a bookstore across from your gate and consider picking up a new title for the journey, one extra step in your quest for an edge. Something that informs you about the distant market your competitors are entering, where you also happen to be considering an exotic getaway. A title that attunes you to the psychology of closing the deal with your customer, worth trying with your romantic partner, too. A volume that inspires you professionally and also entertains you personally. Something good, and good for you, too.

You’re dressed to impress. What should you read to succeed?

You could read Sebastian Mallaby’s 800-page biography of Alan Greenspan, recent winner of the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. If, however, that sounds about as exciting to you as watching the former Fed Chair paint his living room, then consider a great story instead.

Stories are useless works of art. Yet, the recognition that art is intrinsically valuable is, ironically, instrumentally valuable for business, reminding us that not all value can be measured. Moreover, humanities scholars have long suspected what psychologists and neuroscientists are now attempting to prove, that stories can also cultivate human character. They may improve our ability to understand others, transport us to other worlds in which we connect with strangers, and introduce us to new places and people– all useful for business success. I’ve been assigning stories to business executives and students for years to help them succeed personally and professionally.

Unfortunately, great stories that are relevant to business in this century can be challenging to discover. Since the 2005 launch of the Business Book of the Year award, only one novel has even made the long list: Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End in 2007. The book makes my “Living List of Stories for 21st Century Global Capitalism” for its farcical depiction of a modern American ad agency that invites the reader seriously to consider survival amid downsizing. It’s useful and entertaining, but in my opinion, the business book of the year in 2007 was Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a suspenseful narrative of predator and prey ranging from Pakistan to Princeton and back.

My favorites from 2016 include Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun, which depicts the underclass and gray markets that are often invisible to the powerful, and David Szalay’s All That Man Is, a compilation of interrelated stories of men in different stages of adulthood experiencing anomie and ennui at work and in life. Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, about the relationship between a Lehman executive and his immigrant chauffeur before the financial collapse, is next on my reading table.

The list is unique in that it consists solely of fictional stories and novels published since 2000 and/or that are by or about emerging market and/or female authors and protagonists, directly or allegorically doing business. It is intended to supplement (not supplant) other incomplete compilations of business stories that are of mixed quality or that tend to reflect the same Western male bias characteristic of 20th century capitalism (see here, here, here, here, here and here). It is a living list, so please revisit it periodically, and if you would like to suggest a story for inclusion, please see below for how to do so. Thank you, and happy reading!

 

More About the List, Including How to Suggest a Story

The list as currently constructed comes from recommendations I have received after presentations delivered at management conferences on several continents in the past several years, solicitation on MLA Commons (the online community of the Modern Language Association for literature and language scholars), and my own reading.

I plan periodically to repeat the solicitations of scholars, but now that the list is public, I invite also the contributions of other knowledgeable experts. The basic criteria for inclusion on the list are length, quality, and relevance, as explained in detail in my recent Academy of Management Learning and Education essay, “A Novel Approach to Business Ethics Education”. As for length, the story or novel should be able to be read in the course of, say, a one-week business trip (including flight time and late evenings). A few of the stories on the list break the 500-page barrier, but most are considerably shorter, including several short stories of less than 50 pages.

Quality is difficult to quantify, and some literature scholars doubt even that it can be rated or ranked. Some of the stories on this list have been around long enough to be considered classics, and others have won recent literary awards. The rest have been recommended to be worth the reader’s time and effort by management and literature experts, including me. (When stories have been suggested by multiple experts, I have generally identified the first person to recommend it.) Availability in English, the conventional language of global business, is another simultaneous virtue and vulnerability of the list. Even though the content of the list attempts to avoid a Western, affluent market bias, many of the contributors to the list are from Western institutions. Some items on the list may be offensive to some audiences, but the list errs on the side of inclusiveness and eschews subjective censorship. Slow reader that I am, I have read most but not all of them myself, relying instead on the recommendations of others. I would like especially to thank Pati Provinske, Research Associate at the University of St. Thomas, for her efforts to populate the details of the initial list.

There is also a certain amount of judging books by their covers that qualifies these stories as relevant to business. They must have been published since 2000 and/or by or about emerging market and/or female and/or other under-represented authors and protagonists, directly or allegorically doing business. They do not have to take place in an office. The stories on the list demonstrate that much business takes place outside of the confines of board and meeting rooms.

If you would like to suggest a story for the list, please fill in the Webform below, which confirms your consent to identify you by name and institution if it is included and you are the first to recommend it. Thank you! 

 

Christopher Michaelson is David A. and Barbara Koch (pronounced “coach”) Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at the University of St. Thomas and on the Business and Society faculty at New York University.