A private equity professional recently told me that Franz Kafka's century old short story Poseidon should be required reading for anyone who hopes to lead. In Kafka’s telling, the god of the sea isn’t commanding waves or stirring storms, he’s drowning in paperwork and unable to do the work he was born to do. The executive saw himself in this ancient deity more profoundly than any management case study.
His reaction points to something deeper that most leaders miss: overwhelm isn’t a sign of importance. Sometimes it’s a sign of misalignment between what leadership demands and what leadership is. Unlike management theory, fiction shows us our blind spots, rationalizations, the gap between our intentions and our impact.
Sadly, we've created a false binary between "serious" reading and "pleasure" reading. Many leaders pride themselves on reading about strategy and innovation while intentionally shunning literature that highlights the human dynamics that make or break every strategic initiative. A biography of your favorite leader may inspire you or a new business book may feel instructive, but a fictional story with an ethical dilemma will help you see yourself and better understand your teams.
The science may surprise you: people who read fiction consistently score higher on cognitive measures—including general intelligence—than those who stick to non-fiction. Fiction uniquely trains your brain to understand the thoughts, feelings and motivations of others. In other words, it builds the muscle that every great leader needs most: empathy. If you manage people, reading fiction might be the most overlooked tool in your arsenal. Here are three ways it can sharpen your judgement, deepen your insight, and help you lead with greater clarity and connection.
Stories As Practice For Better Leadership
Your summer reading choices don’t just signal your values, they literally reshape your brain: strengthening the neural pathways that make you better at navigating the unspoken dynamics in your next board meeting. When we read about characters—their thoughts, emotions and motivations— we activate the same neural pathways we rely on to understand people. The brain’s default network—the system that supports our capacity to imagine and simulate hypothetical circumstances—treats fictional scenarios as practice runs for real life.
Consider Kafka’s perplexing novella, The Metamorphosis. Traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes one morning to find that he has been transformed into a hideous bug. Unable to work, he struggles to reframe his sense of belonging. Unable to speak, Gregor finds himself and his relationships in deep crisis. Through his story, Kafka forces us to consider how much we define our humanity by the work we do, the company we keep and the existential disorientation of a rapid and unexpected change of circumstance. Written in 1915, this haunting tale foreshadows the modern crisis of identity fueled by mass layoffs, burnout and the looming fear of being replaced by machines. The Metamorphosisinstructs leaders in the delicate balance of purpose, identity and motivation, and how easily that balance can be derailed.
The executive who reads literature becomes more adept at perspective-taking and navigating interpersonal complexity. As one manufacturing CEO remarked about his own conversion to literature: “When you can step into the shoes of a character which is like stepping into the shoes of someone else on your team, you recognize that how they’re experiencing the world is very different from how you are experiencing the world.”
Fiction As A Laboratory For Moral Complexity
Fiction provides a low-risk laboratory to explore the gray areas of power, delegation, and moral ambiguity. Its characters present clashing motives and complex choices, creating a dynamic space to explore right and wrong and the murky territory in between.
Consider Charles Johnson’s allegory “Menagerie: A Child’s Fable,” an affecting story about a pet store whose owner goes missing, leaving the caged animals to fend for themselves. The watchdog, Berkeley, holds the keys to open the cages. Monkey, with questionable intentions but functioning hands, is the only one who can. Animals take charge and the situation devolves, ending in death and destruction. The story refuses to offer easy answers. When Berkeley fails to maintain order and Monkey exploits the chaos, we're forced to confront uncomfortable questions about authority, trust, and unintended consequences, the very dynamics that derail organizations.
For the leadership team of an appliance manufacturer, the cages in the story became a metaphor for the silos they had built—and maintained—within their organization. The narrative challenged them to confront their own role in creating these barriers, even as they grappled with the difficulty of dismantling them. When our proverbial cages are as much about comfort as they are about separation, shifting that mindset requires time, honesty and sustained effort.
This is where fiction outshines the case study. While case studies offer tidy solutions to someone else’s problems, fiction invites you to wrestle with your own. It mirrors real leadership—messy, uncertain and shaped by perspective. With no real-world stakes, stories let you explore moral complexity, confront bias and explore ideas you might reject in the pressure of work.
Narrative As Training For Strategic Thinking
Fiction trains leaders to think across multiple, often conflicting timelines—narrated by voices of uncertain reliability. The challenge isn’t just to follow the story, but also to decide who to believe. Few novels capture this complexity as powerfully as Hernan Diaz’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust. Told through four interlocking narratives—a bestselling novel, a self-serving memoir, a ghostwriter’s account, and the voice of the main character’s long-suffering wife—the story continually reframes what we think we know. Each layer unravels the last, reminding us that truth is often a matter of perspective.
This same narrative confusion often plays out at work. Imagine a fairly routine decision to implement a new performance management system. HR sees it as modernization and fairness. Middle managers view it as morale-killing bureaucracy. Senior leadership frames it as much-needed accountability. Employees experience it as mistrust and micromanagement. All perspectives contain truth, so the leader who only hears one risks being blindsided when implementation fails.
Books like Trust are the perfect training for the kind of perspective-taking that separates good leaders from great ones. Leaders who can read between the lines of organizational stories become better at diagnosing team dynamics and recognizing the hidden narratives driving resistance to change.
Your summer reading matters more than you think. Choose a novel or short story collection that challenges your assumptions and stretches your perspective. While others stick to well-worn management playbooks, you’ll be cultivating the empathy, insight, and narrative intelligence that define truly exceptional leaders. Like the private equity leader transformed by a single story, you may find that that fiction doesn’t just change what you think—it changes how you see the world and lead through it.
First published in Forbes.com.
