Reading fiction good for improving business acumen

Anne Kreamer, reviewing this work in the Harvard Business Review recently, put it nicely: “It’s when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavour of alternate worlds of experience.”

Truly great novelists have a very sharp eye when it comes to watching the way people live, relate and interact. They are able to weave this understanding into their characters and plot and dramatic structure, to create a product that leaves the brain stimulated in a way few other experiences can deliver.
As I have written on this page in the past: “Business is about life, and so is fiction. The great businessperson must understand people, their driving emotions, their ambitions and their fears, and what causes their rise or fall. A great novelist delivers precisely that understanding.

If you want to know your employees and their motivations better; if you want to comprehend the lives of your customers better; if indeed you want to do the Socratic thing and know yourself better; you could do worse than crack open a great novel by a great writer.”

So what are you going to do, folks? Let’s be realistic: those who hate fiction aren’t suddenly going to run out to buy Dickens and Tolstoy. Love of novels is generally created and sealed in childhood.

But those who do read novels need no longer regard it as a guilty pleasure: it’s probably a vital tool in helping you run things better. For those who don’t read “made-up” stories, you’re going to have to find other ways of being exposed to the swirl of human emotion all around you, and figuring it out.

Fiction may be a lie, but as Stephen King pointed out, good fiction is the truth within the lie.

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