The leadership benefits of reading are wide-ranging.

Evidence suggests reading can improve intelligence and lead to innovation and insight.

Some studies have shown, for example, that reading makes you smarter through “a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge in addition to the abstract reasoning skills.”

Reading — whether Wikipedia, Michael Lewis, or Aristotle — is one of the quickest ways to acquire and assimilate new information. Many business people claim that reading across fields is good for creativity.

And leaders who can sample insights in other fields, such as sociology etc.

This is terrible for leadership, where my experience suggests those trends are even more pronounced.

Business people seem to be reading less — particularly material unrelated to business.

But deep, broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our grea...