July 21, 2007
C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success
By HARRIET RUBIN
Correction Appended
Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist who built a personal $1.5 billion
fortune discovering the likes of Google, YouTube, Yahoo and PayPal, and
taking them public, may seem preternaturally in tune with new media. But it
is the imprint of old media - books by the thousands sprawling through his
Bay Area house - that occupies his mind.
"My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books," Mr. Moritz said in an
interview. "As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent
place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one,
they have gradually accumulated like sediment."
Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated
to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley,
Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any
subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.
Perhaps that is why - more than their sex lives or bank accounts - chief
executives keep their libraries private. Few Nikecolleagues, for example,
ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his
formal office. To enter, one had to remove one's shoes and bow: the ceilings
were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these
volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing
Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.
The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. "Of course the
library still exists," Mr. Knight said in an interview. "I'm always
learning."
Until recently when Steven P. Jobs of Apple sold his collection, he
reportedly had an "inexhaustible interest" in the books of William Blake -
the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist. Perhaps future
historians will track down Mr. Jobs's Blake library to trace the inspiration
for Pixar and the grail-like appeal of the iPhone
If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: "Don't follow your mentors,
follow your mentors' mentors," suggests David Leach, chief executive of the
American Medical Association's accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked
his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of
Aristotle.
Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. "I try to
vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,"
Mr. Moritz said. "I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove's
'Swimming Across,' which has nothing to do with business but describes the
emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E.
Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom,' an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the
navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar
character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from
atop a camel." Students of power should take note that C.E.O.'s are starting
to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore's tomes
but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even
replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate,
according to John Windle, the owner of John Windle Antiquarian Booksellers
in San Francisco.
Darwin's "Origin of Species" was priced at a few thousand dollars in the
1950s. "Then DNA became the scientific rage," said Mr. Windle. "Now copies
are selling for $250,000. But the desire to own a piece of Darwin's mind is
coming to an end. I have a customer who collects diaries of people of no
importance at all. The entries say, 'It was 63 degrees and raining this
morning.' Once the big boys amass libraries of weather patterns, everyone
will want these works."
C.E.O. libraries typically lack a Dewey Decimal or even org-chart order. "My
books are organized by topic and interest but in a manner that would make a
librarian weep," Mr. Moritz said. Is there something "Da Vinci Code"-like
about mixing books up in an otherwise ordered life?
Could it be possible to read Phil Knight's books in the order in which Mr.
Knight read them - like following a recipe - and gain the mojo to see a
future global entertainment company in something as modest as a sneaker? The
great gourmand of libraries, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, analyzed the
quest for knowledge that causes people to accumulate books: "There must
exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest."
Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving
Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she
translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French
translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli's treatise on how
to overthrow republics, "The Prince." Churchill retreated to his library to
heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 - and after reading
for six years came back to power.
Over the years, the philanthropist and junk-bond king Michael R. Milken has
collected biographies, plays, novels and papers on Galileo, the renegade who
was jailed in his time but redeemed by history.
It took Dee Hock, father of the credit card and founder of Visa, a thousand
books to find The One. Mr. Hock walked away from business life in 1984 and
looked back only from his library's walls. He built a dream
2,000-square-foot wing for his books in a pink stucco mansion atop a hill in
Pescadero, Calif. He sat among the great philosophers and the novelists of
Western life like Steinbeck and Stegner and dreamed up a word for what Visa
is: "chaordic" - complex systems that blend order and chaos.
In his library, Mr. Hock found the book that contained the thoughts of all
of them. Visitors can see opened on his library table for daily consulting,
Omar Khayyam's "Rubáiyát," the Persian poem that warns of the dangers of
greatness and the instability of fortune.
Poetry speaks to many C.E.O.'s. "I used to tell my senior staff to get me
poets as managers," says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3
billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports.
Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington,
Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. "Poets are our original systems thinkers," he
said. "They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the
complexity to something they begin to understand."
He never could find a poet who was willing to be a manager. So Mr. Harman
became his own de facto poet, quoting from his volumes of Shakespeare,
Tennyson, and the poetry he found in Arthur Miller 's "Death of a Salesman"
and Camus's "Stranger" to help him define the dignity of working life - a
poetry he made real in his worker-friendly factories.
Mr. Harman reads books the way writers write books, methodically over time.
For two years Mr. Harman would take down from the shelf "The City of God" by
E. L. Doctorow read the novel slowly, return it to the shelves, and then
take it down again for his next trip. "Almost everything I have read has
been useful to me - science, poetry, politics, novels. I have a lifelong
interest in epistemology and learning. My books have helped me develop a way
of thinking critically in business and in golf - a fabulous metaphor for the
most interesting stuff in life. My library is full of things I might go back
to."
It was the empty library room and its floor-to-ceiling ladder that made
Shelly Lazarus, the chairwoman and chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather, fall
in love with her house in the Berkshires, which was built in 1740. "When my
husband and I moved in, we said, 'We're never going to fill this room,' and
just last week I realized we needed to build an addition to the library.
Once I've read a book I keep it. It becomes a part of me.
"As head of a global company, everything attracts me as a reader, books
about different cultures, countries, problems. I read for pleasure and to
find other perspectives on how to think or solve a problem, like Jerome
Groopman's 'How Doctors Think'; John Cornwall's autobiography, 'Seminary
Boy'; 'The Wife,' a novel by Meg Wolitzer; and before that, 'Team of
Rivals.'
"David Ogilvy said advertising is a great field, anything prepares you for
it," she said. "That gives me license to read everything."
Harriet Rubin is the author of "Dante in Love" and, most recently, "The Mona
Lisa Stratagem: The Art of Women, Age and Power."
Correction: July 24, 2007
An article in Business Day on Saturday about the private library collections
of several business executives referred incorrectly to the Accreditation
Council for Graduate Medical Education, whose chief executive, David Leach,
commented on his collection of the works of Aristotle. The accreditation
council is an independent, nonprofit organization; it is no longer a
division of the American Medical Association. (The two separated in 2003.)
The article also included a quotation from Shelly Lazarus, chairwoman and
chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather, that misstated the title of a book in
her collection. It is "How Doctors Think" by Dr. Jerome Groopman - not "How
to Think Like a Doctor."
source;
www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21libraries.html?ei=5070&en=7db0b
b270d675522&ex=1185940800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print