Summer Reading List for Bankers 2016
June 27, 2016 8:00 AM
Perhaps you read on vacation to escape the financial services grind, or perhaps you read to hone your business craft. Numerous titles on this year's list recommended by American Banker readers, BankThink contributors, our staff and others fall somewhere in between. Read about the lives of figures like Elon Musk or Barney Frank. Understand disruption, human error and how to manage stress. Or, perhaps you just want some insight into the sociopath's playbook. It's all here.
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264746/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465827045&sr=1-1&keywords=EINSTEIN+%E2%80%93+His+Life+and+Universe" target="_blank">Einstein: His Life and Universe</a>
Author: Walter Isaacson
"Albert Einstein is the epitome of how to lead a professional life. He never brags, never boasts, never declares the end of any accepted structure or theory before he actually upends accepted wisdom. He lets his accomplishments speak for themselves. He believed deeply that imagination is more important than knowledge he created the future in leaps, not at the margins. I can't think of a better model for a professional banker or financier. Besides his life lessons, this book rounds out and gives dimension and depth to a historic figure that most people only know in two dimensions his hair and his equivalence formula equating energy to mass (E = mc²)."
Loren Picard, managing executive of G5, a development and consulting firm in the marketplace lending industry
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777" target="_blank">The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion</a>
Author: Jonathan Haidt
"In this highly charged political season, Jonathan Haidt provides some much needed perspective with his analysis of the biological foundation for morality. With many bankers expanding their community outreach programs, understanding how biology affects our intuitions about right and wrong is helping our credit union design purposeful products and align our aspirations for community engagement with our members' moral compass."
Kevin Foster-Keddie, president and CEO of WSECU Corporate
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/0062301233?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0" target="_blank">Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future</a>
Author: Ashlee Vance
"Elon Musk reminds us that great minds don't chase billion dollar IPOs, don't figure out how to make people click ads and don't always aspire to Rolexes and Ferraris. Their dreams advance humanity. But even the optimistic dreamer who's sending a rocket to Mars concluded there's too many regulatory barriers in banking. So he sliced off a piece of the business creating the first fintech, PayPal, selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion. He left with a $250 million paycheck enough seed money to start Tesla, SpaceX and Hyperloop, his fantastical train of the future. Key takeaway: avoid getting pulled into the mud when you're shooting for the stars."
Kevin Tynan, senior vice president of marketing at Liberty Bank in Chicago
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1682302113/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1682302113&linkCode=as2&tag=jpnicols-20&linkId=cada407ce9f7feb9d3c541ce2cbeacb7" target="_blank">Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption</a>
Author: Geoffrey More
"While I'm still recommending Clayton Christensen's 1997 book "The Innovators Dilemma" because I keep running into so many bankers who haven't read it yet, this year's summer reading list is topped by Moore's "Zone to Win." Moore's 1993 book "Crossing the Chasm" has become required reading in Silicon Valley, but this book is applicable to mature enterprises in any industry. Bankers may find its advice and examples eerily relevant as they struggle to find new sources of growth and launch new products while simultaneously defending their core businesses from the assault of disruptive competitors.
JP Nicols, managing director of the FinTech Forge and chairman of
<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/1846558239" target="_blank">Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind</a>
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
"Lest anyone doubt the importance of institutional trust in banking, Harai illustrates just how the evolution of humankind both biologically and socially is built on the foundation of economics and money. Our cognitive development, empire building, political landscape, and capital markets system go hand in hand. Harai chronicles the journey from a simple barter to complex market derivatives landscape, from a nomadic tribe to bustling metropolis, in crystal clear narrative that gives insight into why ideas and concepts like trust are so firmly rooted in our modern institutions, and why it's a challenge to disrupt them."
Ghela Boskovich, director of global business development for Zafin
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Internet-My-Religion-Jim-Gilliam-ebook/dp/B0129BHRD0" target="_blank">The Internet Is My Religion</a>
Author: Jim Gilliam
"Banks see a shift in consumer behavior. They are looking for digital interactions, more social content and are staying away from branches and the way banks traditionally did business. Often, when bankers talk about 'millennials,' I feel like the divide isn't only between service providers and their customers it's a generational gap, of those who grew up before and after the internet. Some, it seems, use 'millennials' and 'my kids' interchangeably. Jim's life story and his rich history along the growth in online activism and activity is a captivating story. It's well written and also serves to illuminate the thought process of those elusive 'millennials' and those who operate in the digital world that not all of us understand or feel comfortable with."
Ohad Samet, a co-founder and chief executive of the debt-recovery company TrueAccord
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Augmented-Life-Smart-Brett-King/dp/9814634034" target="_blank">Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane</a>
Author: Brett King
"Founder of the digital bank Moven and frequent bank critic Brett King was thinking about what skills his children would need to succeed as adults as he wrote his latest book "Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane." Did you know that the number of robots shipped is expected to grow from 6.6 million in 2015 to 31 million robots shipped in 2020 (it may be time to get robot insurance)? And we'll have 10 million self-driving cars on the road by 2020? King also shares his vision for blockchain technology, car banking, Bitcoin wallets, mobile payments and other technologies that will affect the future of financial services. Bottom line: it looks bad for banks unless they step up their offerings."
Penny Crosman, editor at large for American Banker
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error/dp/0754648265" target="_blank">Sidney Dekker's Field Guide to Understanding Human Error</a>
Author: Sidney Dekker
"The Field Guide is a surprisingly subversive manual. Written by and for aviation safety experts, it is actually a crash course in systems thinking, cognitive bias, and resilience. Everyone that was captivated by the ideas of Taleb's "
Will Maier, vice president of engineering at Simple
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0374528373/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465934261&sr=1-1&keywords=brothers+karamazov" target="_blank">The Brothers Karamazov</a>
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
"When I'm teetering on the existential abyss, I turn to this page-turner. Banks, which are struggling to reinvent themselves in a digital age, can relate in a surprising way to the brothers portrayed in this masterpiece. You'll laugh. You'll cry. And after reading, you may even question what your business is all about even more."
Mary Wisniewski, fintech reporter for American Banker, deputy editor of BankThink
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Demand-Discovering-Happiness-Within/dp/0062378856" target="_blank">Joy on Demand</a>
Author: Chade-Meng Tan
"Chade-Meng Tan demonstrates, in an entertaining way, that it is possible to train yourself to manage stress, be in the moment and focus on what matters in life. Through his life story, I was literally transported from my day-to-day activities to a presence of mind outside of work."
Annemieke van der Werff, chief human resources officer for the Americas at MUFG Union Bank, N.A.
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Politics-Society-Same-Sex-Marriage/dp/1250083265/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466711921&sr=1-1&keywords=frank" target="_blank">Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage</a>
Author: Barney Frank
"Few lawmakers have had a bigger impact on banking in recent memory than Barney Frank, the former Democratic congressman and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee who co-authored the Dodd-Frank Act. This memoir is a broader look at his 32-year career on Capitol Hill, including other legislative fights and his coming out as gay. To bankers, Frank has become significantly unpopular for his role in the unpopular post-crisis regulatory reforms, but his lasting legacy as a U.S. political figure is irrefutable."
Joe Adler, editor of BankThink
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Be-Slightly-Evil-Sociopaths-Ribbonfarm-ebook/dp/B00F8JTYH8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466699374&sr=8-1&keywords=Be+Slightly+Evil" target="_blank">Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths</a>
Author: Venkatesh Rao
"Just started reading this (moderately?) Machiavellian e-book about making decisions in the workplace, written by a perspicacious
Marc Hochstein, editor in chief, American Banker
