Oh, this nostalgic fiction of "summer reading"! But hey, it sells books. From St. Petersburg Times business columnist Robert Trigaux's survey of 15 Tampa Bay-area businesspeople on their beach-reading agendas:

A few books of particular insight, including one about the virtues of the snap judgment and instinctive hunch, appeared on multiple lists this summer. Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, wins praise from AmSouth's Florida banking executive Susan Martinez, St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention & Visitors Bureau chief Carole Ketterhagen and Peter Rummell, CEO of St. Joe Co. (Florida's biggest private land owner).

"EVERYONE who deals with people should HAVE to read it," Rummell wrote (the capitalized words are his) in an e-mail.

Others mentioned books with similar themes. Deanne Roberts of Roberts Communications in Tampa, just back from a tour of Eastern Europe, is reading James Surowiecki's long-titled The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The book makes a counterintuitive argument that the wisdom of the masses "under the right circumstances" is often smarter than the smartest person in the crowd.

I love how much editorializing ("the capitalized words are his," "long-titled") Trigaux gets into this short passage; it can be a life saver in a thanklessly list-y piece like this. A roundup like this is actually a pretty good indicator of the attention span of American capital:

This time, Dan Brown's super-selling The Da Vinci Code is still on a few lists but is no longer the dominating read it was in past years. And books about Middle East history, religion and terrorism—big topics on summer lists after 9/11—are less prominent but can be found.
...
One favorite (and I must agree) is Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, the New York Times columnist's look at how globalization and technology have enabled anyone with drive and talent to compete with anyone else, anywhere. In the United States, that message is only now starting to sink in.... From the big picture to the highly focused, books on Six Sigma are also popular.... History also remains a hot topic.

Call me preoccupied (I am, happily), but Trigaux's lede sounds a bit like the gossip columns Sean Wilsey quotes with such glee in Oh the Glory: "Other than her ability to run a Coca-Cola Enterprises call center in Tampa and her fondness for a swift Porsche, I knew little about Nita Pennardt." Or it's a Danielle Steel noir. Fiction students: Go make your millions!

Reading Lists of Business Elites [St. Petersburg Times]

Categories: Gladwell, Surowiecki, Extracurriculars