A Founder's Reading List for Shelter-in-Place

With no commute (I would normally drive or take a ride-sharing service) and no travel I, like many people who are home-bound these days, have been reading a lot. I love to read, with a normal pace of a book every week or two in normal times and now am finding that’s where I’m turning even more than normally given little need (or ability!) to leave the house. In this, I find myself often turning to lessons from history, science and literature as I think about how to manage myself and our business through our current crisis. In what I hope is useful for other founders, start-up executives and really anyone who is looking for insight and inspiration in the moment, here is my Shelter-in-Place recommended reading list:

Understanding a Crisis

I’m neither a virologist nor epidemiologist, so I’ve been relying on expert reports for daily updates on COVID-19’s progression. But to contextualize these reports and data, I’ve found it very helpful to fall back to insights gleaned from Smil’s expansive Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. His section on microorganisms provides a powerful framework and set of historical context for thinking about forward projections on any infectious disease’s growth, and also demonstrates over and over how powerful and scary exponential growth can be. Additionally, for those of us whose formal statistics training is more than a decade dated, I’d highly recommend Ellenberg’s How Not to be Wrong for a great introduction or refresher on how to use a variety of straight-forward mathematical techniques to draw correct conclusions in light of the data available (and also give a sense when the right answer is “we can’t really know.”).

Yes, it’s an investment book, but I’d highly recommend Marks’ Mastering the Market Cycle to understand why business and market cycles are a “rule,” and also to understand what this means as a user (or provider) of capital. I think it would be easy to paint this as an “investor” book, but the reality is that as an entrepreneur, a big part of your role is to understand where, how and when to source capital for your venture. This book provides a clear framework for how investors, or at least disciplined ones, think about this -- which is going to be a critical question in the months ahead for companies thinking to raise.

On the surface of it, the specifics may feel far afield, but Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl provides a powerful assessment of what happens when you mix a deadly -- but technically complex -- problem and initial government indifference and denial. This story also paints a picture of the unlikely heroes who emerge in moments such as these: experts risking it all to stop the spread of something deadly, but very poorly understood. We can hope that the fallout from Covid-19 will be far less, but time will tell.

Leading Through Uncertainty, and in Difficult Times

I’m a history nerd (a parallel universe life aspiration has me teaching economic history) and recently finished Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times. This parallel biography of U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Roosevelt, Roosevelt and Johnson shows how different difficult moments shaped the character of each (very different) man, and how these experiences ultimately enabled each to navigate difficult moments in their Presidency. This book gave me an opportunity to feel that our problems as business leaders are small by comparison, and also provided tangible examples of how each leader drove to outcomes in highly uncertain moments.

It is a leadership truism that leading others starts with effectively leading one’s self. In hard times I always return on Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. His reminders to focus on developing virtue in the inner self, not becoming obsessed with outer reward, and encouragement to be in the moment are important reminders, especially in times such as these. As Seneca writes, “There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

Remembering The Human Side

As leaders we must remember that our discipline is fundamentally a human one. With literature as perhaps the best vessel for bearing human empathy, I’d be remiss not to finish this list with two plague-set novels. These works encourage us to remember our humanity, even in darker times: such a list would be incomplete without a nod toward Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, an ode to love while as a critique of obsession (and a far better book than it was a movie). Second, and an even more powerful and timely read, would be Camus’ The Plague. Famous as a layered account of human resistance, with a cast of characters who demonstrate a wide range of human potential and existence, this work will leave you asking more questions -- which, for better or for worse, most of us have more time to explore these days.

Enjoy, and share what you think.