The book that every leader should read this summer according to Bill Gates

Every spring, the tycoon at the head of Microsoft for so many years recommends a list of books on various topics to cultivate us a little in the summer months. They can be about economics, science, technology or just a good novel.

This has been a particularly eventful year for Bill Gates, who has left Microsoft’s board of directors to undertake new projects after 45 years as the company’s co-founder. He has also announced his divorce with Melinda French, although they will continue to work in the foundation they run together, and he has had to overcome the avalanche of fake news and hoaxes about the pandemic that accused him of wanting to implant microchips in the population with the vaccine.

Now that all this news, gossip and hoaxes have calmed down, he has published his long-awaited list of books for the summer, among which is “Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric“, the story that explains the fall of General Electric.

Coronavirus? Books that were able to predict the future with great precision

Describing the future, broadly speaking, is relatively simple. Doing it with pinpoint precision has some magic. These books anticipated what would happen decades, even centuries later, as if their authors had traveled back in time.

Read the report

Gates recommends this book for all those who have a position with some responsibility in a company as a lesson in leadership that should not be exercised. General Electric went from being a multinational company of great importance to being worth 70% lessa sequence of bad decisions led them almost to extinction.

Paying too much attention to market analysts and getting their praise for short-term gains, not paying attention to problems or failures by censoring everything that sounds critical and falls outside of the glorious narrative of the company, and wanting to cover more markets and industries where it could are some of the mistakes blamed on GE in this book. “A book to see where the system failed and why it led to the fall of a great companyGates explains.

Along with this book, the tycoon recommends others that may be just as interesting depending on the interests and tastes of each one. He recommends Barack Obama’s book “A Promised Land,” the first volume of the former US president’s memoirs, which Gates says is “It is a powerful book with a lot of information about leadership“.

It also includes some novels, books on the human immune system so important these months of pandemic and in full vaccination campaign, and a title on the fight against climate change in which Bill Gates has been heavily involved for years.