What Billionaire Business Titans are Reading and Why Poets Make Better Leaders

Posted on December 3, 2007
Filed Under Books, Business & Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Psychology |

Page one of Today’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating story about Phil Knight, the founder and now chairman, of Nike, Inc.  And what’s so interesting about Mr. Knight has little to do with how he built the industry titan Nike, or about his time as CEO.  Last spring, the billionaire businessman nonchalantly sat in the back of a creative writing seminar at Stanford University as a mystery man.  He wore a black blazer and white Nikes and said his name was Phil.

As the days passed, the man’s identity gradually came into focus. The instructor “made several vague allusions to Phil taking off in his private jet,” recalls André Lyon, an English major enrolled in the class. And tales about Michael Jordan found their way into the man’s literary discourse.

After a couple of weeks, a rumor began to circulate that the old dude in the Nikes was Philip H. Knight, the billionaire founder of the world’s largest sportswear company.

And ‘Phil’ wasn’t just some weird dude in the back of the classroom either.  He not only fully participated, but he also hung out with classmates in his down time:

Mr. Knight was, however, a full participant in the class. His homework assignments, circulated to classmates, show a candid passion for words. “Write sensuously. Words have feeling,” he advised in a short essay dated April 25, 2006. “The simplest use of words can often have the greatest power.” Students in the weekly sessions remember debating Mr. Knight about themes and characters in novels like “Kiss of the Spider Woman” by Manuel Puig and Edward Schwarzschild’s “Responsible Men.”

Though notably older than his fellow students, Mr. Knight soon became a popular fixture on the Stanford campus, known for hosting after-class gatherings at Palo Alto bars with his wife, Penny, before taking a private jet back to his home outside Portland, Ore. “He’d always pay,” recalls Mr. Stillman.

The New York Times ran a great piece back in July on CEO’s and books too, and it reveals that they don’t spend most of their time reading the latest business guru’s.  Thier libratries were methodically built around great works of literature.

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete.

And apparently literature majors make better managers than business majors:

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.”

No wonder why these billionaires guard their libraries more than their sex lives and bank accounts.  Phil Knight is a perfect example:

Few Nike colleagues, 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.”

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