“What to Read” is actually “How to Imagine.”

An unconventional reading list for ambitious marketers and planners

I went to the book launch of Velocity: Seven Laws for a World Gone Digital a few years back. I had my $20.00 hard cover for AKQA’s Ajaz Ahmed to sign. 

Someone asked him, “You’re one of the kingpins of all things digital. Why did you publish an old-fashioned book?” 

He replied charmingly, “I love ink-on-paper books and collect them. I dream of having children and grandchildren and having a library crammed with books where they can come talk to me and know that I wrote one of them.” 

I have joined his ranks and written a book that I hope will both make you laugh and inspire you: Save Your Soul: Work in Advertising.

But when was the last time you walked by the workspace of someone you know and saw that they were reading a book? 

And how many of your colleagues keep books - the kind you read, not just look at - on their desk? 

The marketing business has become much less book-collecting than it used to be but people still read books – it’s just that you’re more likely to find them doing that during long-haul travel or at their bedside. 

And then there are those who are perfectly happy to read all of their books on a Kindle - which is convenient for the reader but leaves no trace to nudge the rest of us by dint of its beguiling physical presence.

Nonetheless I frequently get asked by younger people in the business, “What should I be reading?”

No one writes without also being a reader. Good writers would prefer to read rather than write because writing is so much more difficult. But write they do. Because they aspire to it and because they know there’s power in sharing your ideas and experiences in a captivating way.

I find, when I’m reading, I’m absorbing a new way to think and imagine things. The writer’s voice and perspective begins to shape my own. My way of thinking is based upon everyone I have known and read…plus, of course that personal spark that’s all my own.

So I’ve organized this reading (and watching) list according to different ways of thinking and seeing the world – in a word, imagination.

I’m just going to assume you’ve benefited from a liberal arts education and that you’ve read key works in the Western canon. The Bible. Plato. Miguel Cervantes. William Shakespeare. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Emily Dickinson. Virginia Woolf. If you haven’t, well, that’s where to start. I'm deeply interested in world culture but the West is where I received my education and have spent all of my professional life.

 1. Think like an Entertainer

Keep a list of all the opinions your organization’s leaders hold which you know are blocking them from being more empathetic and culturally aware. When you see a piece of dialogue or a funny joke that could make them more empathetic or insightful, rewind, capture it on your phone and save it and memorize it and weave it into the stories you are telling.

All this content was designed to engross, distract, fascinate and amuse us. It is insight disguised as entertainment.

South Park

Corrosive and iconoclastic, it’s worth the price of admission just to see the brilliant parody of two modern icon brands, Whole Foods and Amazon.

The Simpsons

If it hasn’t been on the Simpsons, it’s not part of pop culture. This is truly the encyclopedia of modern pop culture.

Silicon Valley

A welcome relief from the tiresome rhetoric of start-up, tech and social media culture.

All stand-up comedy, in particular Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj

Anything by Judd Apatow

Whether it’s his incredibly funny movies or just his stand up, Apatow brilliantly lampoons modern mores in his own empathetic and lovable way.

2. Think like an Artist

A brilliant painting, a song, an amazing piece of writing…all of these fuse someone’s life experience into a work of art. There is such a power in contemplating art when you are in search of a great insight or a feeling you want to capture that could take your brand to the next level.

Patrick Rynck, How to Read a Painting

A good primer for those of us who didn’t go to art school.

Sister Wendy, Story of Painting (10-part series available on YouTube)

Get over your snobbism and let Sister Wendy captivate you with her innocent love of beautiful paintings.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Superbly articulate exploration of why and how photography fascinates the modern mind.

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

The tale of how, in modern art, the opinion about the painting became more important than the painting itself. 

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae

A tour de force about the interrelation of sex, art and violence.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Oscar Wilde wrote this short work while he was imprisoned for homosexuality. It is a stunning portrayal of what it means to be an artist.

Howard Goodall’s Story of Music (6-part series available on YouTube)

Goodall takes you through the entire history of Western music. You will never listen to Gregorian chant, Beethoven or an opera in quite the same way again.

3. Think like a Double Agent

One of my professors of cultural anthropology at the Sorbonne was fond of saying, “Culture hides more than it reveals and what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.” When you learn to think like a cultural anthropologist, you become a double agent. You can participate in your own cultural codes but it’s only when you leave them, adopt another frame of understanding and then come back that you finally truly understand your own culture as well as the new one that you are studying. 

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

The media that we use, including language itself, profoundly shape our minds. This great piece of historical analysis will give you the priceless ability to imagine how we humans might be if we were not literate. There’s a reason why Wired magazine made Marshall McLuhan their official patron saint.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

A series of brilliant essays that reveals the deeper meaning of pop culture: everything from Marlene Dietrich’s face to the Citroen DS to the significance of le steak tartare.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Cultural critic Susan Sontag helps you decode the power of photographic images.

Graphic Guides: Anthropology, Semiotics, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault

These wonderful “comic books” are anything but juvenile and by seeking to illustrate difficult abstract concepts into visually-driven stories, performing a real service to those of us who don’t have patience to read some of the greatest minds in cultural criticism and semiotics. I was fortunate to attend lectures by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan when I was a student at the Sorbonne and I use these as my refresher courses.

Laurent Binet, The 7th Function of Language

If you really get into the French semiotic intellectual scene, this is one of the most hilarious and insightful comedies you will ever read.

4. Think like a Dystopian

I love Westworld and Black Mirror; they paint riveting pictures of where it might all be going. But there is something to be said for reading, rather than viewing, science fiction and cyber punk. It requires you to paint your own picture and in the process helps you to better understand the present.

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Stephenson, along with Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, is one of the great masters of cyberpunk, darkly dystopian science fiction. He published Snow Crash in 1992 and it remains incredibly rich, comic and fascinating: a portrayal of a near future in which immersive technology and extreme capitalism massively change all of human affairs.

Dave Eggers, The Circle

A masterpiece in comic sociology that brilliant captures the controlling, delusional, privacy-invading ethos at Facebook, Google and Amazon.

Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief

A new entrant into modern cyberpunk that outlines the dark possibilities of mind control emerging from modern technology.

Matt Haig, The Humans

This is anthropology disguised as entertainment. An alien is embedded in our world to spy on us and files their reports. Hilarious and thought provoking.

5. Think Like a Saint

Those of us in the West once lived in a world in which everything we do was animated by a living spirit who had done something incredible in the midst of the same fragility and confusion we all feel: a saint. Every profession and calling in life had a patron saint. To read their stories is to enter into the greatest mystique of the West: charity combined with hardcore individualism.

Augustine, Confessions

Saint Augustine casts a very long shadow. By portraying the development of spiritual development as a personal experience, he accentuated the relationship between Christianity and individualism. This is an amazing read, moving, thought-provoking and utterly unforgettable. I particularly appreciate one little detail: his description of what it was like to go, unwillingly, to the games at the Roman Coliseum and to then be caught up in the collective bloodlust.

Louis De Wohl, The Citadel of God

As the Roman Empire crumbled, a young aristocrat, who we know as Saint Benedict went off in search of true wisdom. This novel tells the story of his life and helps us to understand the origins of the monastic system that gave birth to both hospitals and universities. 

Mark Twain, Joan of Arc

Mark Twain considered this his most important book in part because he wrote it about the young woman he considered to be the greatest person who ever lived. This 15th century teenage saint and acting head of the armies of France led a life just as wildly epic as any fictional character in Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones.

6. Think like an Historian

The anthropologist must leave their native culture and travel to a new one in order to fully understand their native culture, not just the new one they are studying. This is how you escape parochial thinking. But we often forget that there is another kind of narrow thinking: the parochialism of the present. Reading history is its antidote.

Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation

What did Socrates, Buddha, Jeremiah and Confucius all have in common? Their lives coincided within 100 years of each other and all over the planet they pioneered whole new ways of thinking about the human adventure. Armstrong places these iconic figures in their full historical context and thereby leads you to a much deeper appreciation of what they represent to all of us, still to this day.

Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres

The great grandson of one of the founding fathers of America voyaged to Mont St. Michel and Chartres and wrote a striking appreciation of the culture of Middle Ages as embodied by these two architectural masterpieces.

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

“Homo Ludens” means “Humans who Play.” Huizinga reveals just how important play is to human life, how it activates our creativity, our lust for life and our sense of the sacred and he shows us how this theme was at the heart of all of human life in the high Middle Ages. I think it’s coming back in our time. After you’ve read this, you can never walk a hipster neighborhood without appreciating how vital a cultural transformation is taking place there.

Cardinal Newman, The Idea of the University

This totally orthodox Catholic thinker wrote an astounding celebration of absolute intellectual freedom – the very basis of the true University. There’s a reason why the program of study is called liberal arts: the intention is to have a free mind, capable of the fullest agency. 

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tocqueville, a sociologist and philosopher came to America in the 1840s to investigate its penal system on behalf of the French government. But his mission evolved into an investigation of a whole new kind of society being formed which he predicted would make a considerable impact on the entire world for centuries to come. He made a startling number of very specific predictions about what would unfold in America over the next century. They all came true. That alone makes this an engrossing read but the real benefit of exposing yourself to Tocqueville’s perceptions and insights is that you will understand, as you never have before, why the dread of being lost in a mass society hangs over all of us.

7. Think like a Novelist

Read at least four or five novels a year. Novels develop your empathy and imagination. Your own story telling becomes more vivid and engrossing.

Ian McEwan, On Chesnil Beach

If emotions are our inchoate weather, Ian McEwan is our articulate meteorologist.

Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

There is a thin veil between reality and fantasy. In Murakami novels it disappears altogether.

 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Memory is destiny and Proust is its spokesperson.

Balzac, The Pere Goriot trilogy

Balzac perfectly captured the coruscating energy of ambition and the way that modern society devours it - often at the expense of its protagonist.

Lampedusa, The Leopard

Set in Sicily in the time of Garibaldi, this is a beautifully detailed elegy of the passing of the aristocratic ideal. A rich tableau of society – Burt Lancaster made an extraordinary interpretation of its hero in the 1965 Visconti movie by the same name; Martin Scorsese counts it as one of the greatest movies ever made.

8. Think like a City

Take your favorite city and read its history and read historical novels that take place in that city. Learn to see a city across time: its changing economies, identity, daily life and moods.

9. Think like a Survivor

There is nothing like being a participant in a slow-motion epic disaster and surviving to tell the tale and its lesson; in the business of brand building, the twin contributors to epic failure are 1) grandiosity and 2) rampant fear. 

Steven Bach, Final Cut

The inside story of Hollywood’s biggest disaster, Heaven’s Gate, directed, incidentally, by a former commercials director, Michael Cimino.

Randall Rothenberg, Where the Suckers Moon: Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign

The inside story of how Subaru made a search for an ad agency, chose Weiden + Kennedy so they could be “the Nike of automobiles,” and then, with their new agency, drove the business into the ditch.

10. Think like a Psychopath

You are 400% more likely to meet a high-functioning psychopath in the C-Suite than you are in the New York City subway. That’s not my opinion. That’s the assessment of the world expert on psychopathy, Dr. Robert Hare, who gave FBI profilers their psychopathy checklist. So the question is, how are you going to work with them? How do you make them your allies?

Andy McNab, The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success

The interesting thing is, when the shit hits the fan, it’s good to be with a psychopath: they stay cool, collected and calculating. Which is why the SAS looks for the pro-social psychopath. Such an individual is willing to take one for the team and is capable of tremendous courage and impact. McNab teaches you how to achieve this state of mind, and, for those of us who work with psychopaths, how to harness their tremendous potential for bravery. 

11. Think like a Warrior

A lot of people in marketing like the warfare metaphor but they often have superficial concepts of what real warfare is all about. It’s a horrible and disgusting business, a real blasphemy against God and humanity. Which is why the greatest warriors will do anything to avoid it. And also why, once it’s unavoidable, they push for it to be swiftly and conclusively led to its conclusion.

Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle

The stories of the three greatest generals of all time, not conquerors, but liberators: Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton. Brilliant visionaries and benefactors.

12. Think like a Shrink

We are all wounded, some of us more than others. Psychic wounds are difficult to face. From our childhood and adolescence, we unconsciously invent defense mechanisms that succeed in making us feel whole again. But they also prevent us from experiencing deep empathy, proper self-regard and genuine joy. A great therapist can help us uncover what is “really going on,” understand how we got shaped by our wounds and guide us to acceptance, forgiveness and the recovery of true potential. Most organizations develop similar defense mechanisms, a kind of unconscious group think. You can really help lead if you understand them and, without drawing too much attention to it, you can help them get over their narrow thinking. 

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Freud supposedly showed us the way things really are but in fact he was just another pseudo-scientific mythmaker who followed in the footsteps of the misogynist Charcot who invented the idea of hysteria – female madness produced by the “problem” of her uterus/hysterus. In his pursuit of immortality, he conducted various politburo-like purges and divorced himself from the great Carl Jung. Why? Because he was haunted by the fear of death and his thought system was his “immortality project." Each of has an immortality project, some of them benign, some of them dark. This is just a glimpse of the rich insights of Becker. He’s a must read. You will never be the same after you’ve read this book.

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Get the hardcover coffee-table size edition of this book. Its format showcases the beautiful illustrations Jung gathered to illustrate us our collective cultural memory and the structural meaning of some of our greatest myths. Jung’s insights have long outlived those of Freud and to read this book is to enrich your understanding of art and storytelling.

13. Think like a Behavioral Economist

Behavioral Economics is a way of bringing insights that don't feel "fluffy" to bear on how to build brand growth. It gives you a framework from which to build ideas and strategies that work - and an exciting new way to sell those strategies at the top of the corporate food chain.

Daniel Ariely, Predictably Irrational

An entertaining book that debunks the way we think we make all of life decisions rationally. A good first read to open your investigation of this key subject.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

This best-seller introduced the world to the concept of System One, fast intuitive and System Two, slow and deliberative and how and when we use these systems. You can skip the first half if you’re impatient (System One) and plunge right into the second half that makes it all come to life.

Gerald Zaltman, How Consumers Think

This book is now over two decades old but it is still fresh and compelling and will introduce you to power of metaphors in our imagination. They lie there mostly hidden and unexamined and it’s important how to tease them out into the open so you can better understand how to communicate and activate effectively.

Richard Shotton, The Choice Factory

This new book takes Behavioral Economics insights and shows you in simple and practical terms how to apply them to solve every day marketing challenges.

Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense

Rory Sutherland might just well be the wisest and most entertaining person in the business of marketing and advertising today. His new book, appearing in May of 2018 (I’ve already pre-ordered) is a sure bet to be illuminating and thought provoking.

14. Oh, and think like a Strategist

If you just read books about marketing strategy, you will become tactically smart but culturally poor. But when you combine your great curiosity about culture, psychology and the human adventure with some great inspiration about marketing, you become a force to be reckoned with.

Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know

Jim Stengel, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth at the World’s 50 Great Companies

Sharp and Stengel may well be the two most influential thinkers about marketing today. They disagree on many important topics and I don’t feel any need to choose a camp but have benefitted from the wisdom of both. Sharp shows you how deluded many marketers are about what a brand is and he gives you a renewed respect for the basics of just showing up at the right place and right time with a category-relevant product offer. Stengel, on the other hand, will inspire you to build your brand with an abiding sense of human purpose that transcends the category but is relevant to it.

Jon Steel, Pitch Perfect: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business

Jon Steel is one of the greatest planners ever. In Pitch Perfect, he gives you an amazing course in making presentations that move your audience and sell your idea. Priceless.

Stephen King, A Masterclass in Brand Planning

Don’t try to read this rich book all at once. A few pages will have your brain whirring. I keep it on my desk and peel off a few pages at a time.

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