Leadership

5 Recent Books That Executives Should Read

Dec. 7, 2016

Here are five recent books that are well worth leaders' reading time.

Executives should not live by spreadsheets alone. At this holiday season, I humbly suggest five recent books well worth executive and managerial reading time. Indeed, to provide more time for reading—and for reflection—the list and book descriptions are deliberately brief.

An Accident of Geography by Richard Blum (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2016). Compassion, innovation, and the fight against poverty from the perspective a private-equity investor and philanthropist.

The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton by William E. Leuchtenburg (Oxford University Press, 2015). A distinguished American historian offers the critical and essential analysis of the use and abuse of executive power during the 20th Century.

Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye (Random House, 2016). In his remarkable biography of Robert Kennedy writer Larry Tye documents with candor and humanness the interplay of experience, reason, and faith in a notable political life.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 2015). Quite simply, the Wright stuff soars.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2016). Slavery and freedom, justice and injustice, and morality and immorality are masterfully related in a haunting novel of 19th-Century America.

Another of a series of occasional essays by John S. McClenahen, an award-winning writer and photographer who for nearly four decades wrote about international economics, public policy, and management for IndustryWeek.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.