Read to Lead

Jeff Brown is a radio producer and podcaster. He has worked for more than twenty-five years in the radio and music industries, and his Read to Lead podcast features interviews with hundreds of thought leaders in their respective industries. He is the founder of the Podcaster Academy, and an adjunct instructor ro Middle Tennessee State University. Jeff Brown is a graduate of Indiana University - Purdue University and Ball State University.

Jesse Wisnewski is director of marketing at PhoneBurner. His work has been featured in Forbes, CNBC Make It, The Muse, and elsewhere. He was previously senior marketing manager for HarperCollins Christian Publishing, and a senior account manager for The A Group. He is a graduate of the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and Marshall University.

The best tool for professional career development is to establish a regular habit of reading books. Reading more will sharpen your skills, help you become more influential, and power you towards the C-suite.

As president Harry S. Truman once noted, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers". Reading books will help you understand people, improve your decision-making skills, enhance your creativity, and sharpen your ability to communicate effectively. The more books you read, the better you're positioned to take the lead in business, and in life in general.

The best thing is no special skills are required to get into the habit of reading more. Create a reading plan, and ramp up your reading regime. Become a lifetime learner. Your future self will thank you.

1. Why you need to read more books. Read like your career depends on it. There are definitive economic advantages to becoming a lifetime learner, especially when so many professions are changing and evolving thanks to technologies. Today is the best time to embrace lifetime learning.

2. Build a personalized reading plan. The books you read will become an integral part of your life and future career. Therefore, it's important that you develop a reading plan, and free up more time for reading. This isn't complicated. A reading plan is really just a checklist of the books you want to read — for pleasure, for professional development, and for personal enrichment. Read for wisdom.

3. Smart ways to read books. To get better at reading books, follow these smarter reading tips:

1. The best tool for professional career development is to establish a regular habit of reading books. Read every day. Your future self will thank you.
2. Read like your career depends on it, because it probably does. There are definitive economic advantages to becoming a lifetime learner in business.

At Summaries.Com, we live to read business books, to extract their best ideas, and to help people become lifetime learners. Therefore, READ TO LEAD was right up our alley. Podcasting guru Jeff Brown and senior marketer Jesse Wisnewski articulate many of the advantages of reading business books that we live with and think about every day. In particular, they make the point that learning today is not go to college and then spend the rest of your career applying what you were taught. They point out, that doesn't work in the modern world, and you need to be prepared to pivot, to gain new marketable skills, and to turn on a dime as markets and technologies evolve.

They also point out reading books is the perfect way to achieve all this. We loved that Harry S. Truman quote: "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers". We also loved what Groucho Marx said, "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself". That complements what Chandler Bolt said, "The smartest, most successful people on the planet have put all their best things they've learned into a book. And for $15 and a few hours of your time, you can learn from them".

Amen to those three thoughts. We're converts. We believe in the power of reading great business books every day. We hope after reading this summary, you'll agree.