With vacation season upon us, Harvard Business School faculty members share what they’re reading this summer, from tomes that feed the analytical brain to those that offer a little escape.

Big themes include artificial intelligence (AI), immigration, the environment, and economics. For lighter fare, summer bookshelves brim with thrillers, memoirs, and short stories, perfect to unwind.

Willy Shih: Looking to the ocean and the skies

One of the books I am reading this summer is Ocean Ecology: Marine Life in the Age of Humans by J. Emmett Duffy. I bought it a few months ago, and I am working my way through different parts. I have become interested in the ecology of oceans after several trips over the last few years, first to South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic in 2023, and then to the Barents Sea and Arctic Ocean over the last two weeks. What has been amazing to me is the complex ecologies with their rich interdependencies, so I decided it was time to learn more about this.

That has also led to a fun read, Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build by Peter Goodfellow. This is a fascinating book about how birds construct nests. I got interested in that after seeing black-browed albatrosses in the Falklands, and northern gannets, murres, and all kinds of other seabirds in the North Atlantic and Arctic. Both of these are great diversions for me!

Shih is the Robert & Jane Cizik Baker Foundation Professor of Management Practice.

Marco Tabellini: A nuanced view of immigration

Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success offers a richly documented, data-driven narrative of US immigration, debunking persistent myths by showing that historical European immigrants did not uniformly arrive destitute or quickly achieve upward mobility, and that today’s immigrants assimilate at similar rates as those a century ago. Drawing on newly linked longitudinal datasets and vivid personal stories, the book presents a nuanced and optimistic view of how immigrants and their children gradually become part of the American fabric.

This is an enlightening book that helped me better understand the long-run dynamics of immigrant integration. It is a crucial read for anyone seeking clarity in the increasingly heated and polarized debate on immigration.

Tabellini is an assistant professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy unit.

Debora L. Spar: AI, memoir, and a legal thriller

During the summer, I try to blend research-related reading with books that are just plain joy. For the former, I’ve been enjoying Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick and Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein. I’m also about to jump into Empire of AI by Karen Hao, which several people have recommended to me.

On the joy side, I couldn’t stop reading Peter Godwin’s Exit Wounds, which is a heartbreaking, glorious memoir. I recommend it highly, along with his earlier memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun. I also just started Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and can’t believe I haven’t read him earlier. He’s an amazing writer and storyteller.

Finally, for a great beach read I’d recommend Bad Nature by Ariel Courage—a twisty thriller about a young lawyer who responds to her cancer diagnosis by deciding to kill her father. It’s Courage’s debut novel and it’s really, really good.

Debora Spar is the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business Administration.

Raffaella Sadun: AI and socratic learning

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future is a series of short stories to help me think about the possible future impact of AI. This should be an interesting read for anyone interested in AI, and for me particularly given the research I am doing in this space.

The other book I am reading (but have not yet completed) is Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. I find the ways in which the book talks about Socratic learning as fundamentally social to be fascinating and very much in sync with what we all aspire to do in the classroom at HBS. This is a great complement to the AI book—perhaps Socratic learning is the superpower that will help us thrive in the age of AI.

Raffaella Safun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Perspective-taking and paperbacks

Summer reading? You mean, besides the mounds of reports, cases, and digital files on professional topics saved for summer catching up? Every year I vow to plow through these, then find myself gravitating to books with professional relevance but also pure pleasure.

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore is an absorbing novel based loosely on important moments in business history: the battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to manage the electrification of New York City in the late 1880s. With the help of young lawyer Paul Cravath, Westinghouse’s AC (alternating current) defeats Edison’s DC (direct current). Many nefarious dealings and one romance later, including an appearance by wild scientist Nikola Tesla, Edison loses the General Electric Company, and Cravath goes on to found one of the first modern law firms.

Billionaire Wilderness by Justin Farrell is a non-fiction sociological report about the social structure of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, an area with the highest income disparities in America. For those without a palace in the mountains, the book offers a vicarious glimpse of the environmental attitudes of the jet set, while also hearing from the poorly paid people who serve them.

Hearing other people’s points of view—a leadership imperative in divided times— is a theme reverberating through several other engrossing novels I recommend. James by Percival Everett powerfully reimagines Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. How to Read a Book by Monica Wood tells a gripping story from the perspectives of three protagonists. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff beautifully renders both sides of a marriage; once we think we fully know one partner, she switches to the other, and everything changes.

But would it be summer without mystery, crime, and courtroom paperbacks? Anything by John Lescroart, Michael Connelly, and John Sandford. This year’s particular pick is Sandford’s Lethal Prey. Perhaps the reports and articles can wait until fall.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernst L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration.

Hise Gibson: Leadership lessons

This summer, I’m looking forward to reading Don Yaeger, Bernie Banks, and Karen Cyphers’ The New Science of Momentum: How the Best Coaches and Leaders Build a Fire from a Single Spark. It combines behavioral science with high-performance coaching insights, making it especially useful for leaders in mission-critical roles.

Alongside that, I also recommend Unleash Your Transformation by Marcos van Kalleveen and Peter Koijen. This book offers frameworks, real-world examples, and practical advice tailored for senior leaders managing major organizational change, serving as a strategic guide for navigating complex transformations.

Hise Gibson is a senior lecturer in the Technology and Operations Management Unit.

Julian De Freitas: Mental health and automation’s boundaries

Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations, by Everett Rogers, has shaped decades of thinking about how innovations spread, from hybrid corn to home appliances. But as a researcher studying today’s breakthrough technologies—like generative AI, social media platforms, and bioengineered tools—I’ve found myself returning to his work with new questions.

Unlike the technologies that were around in Rogers’ time, many of today’s radical innovations are highly platform-based, algorithmic, and shaped by online social dynamics. With these observations in mind, I have been examining where Rogers’ original theory breaks down and fundamentally rethinking it to account for the realities of today’s marketplace.

My lighter read is Thomas Insel’s Healing, which offers a refreshing, human-centered take on mental health: one that moves beyond symptom checklists to focus on connection, purpose, and resilience. I was especially receptive to his call to shift from a deficits-based model to one that supports human flourishing.

That philosophy has helped shape my own research: we recently ran a multi-campus field trial testing whether an AI companion could proactively support student mental health—not by fixing “mental illnesses,” but by building “mental strengths.” In line with Insel’s core insight that healing is not just about fixing what is broken, but about cultivating resilience, we found that students felt less lonely, more connected, and more emotionally resilient over time.

I’ve been rereading The Mind’s I, by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, because I was struck by how prescient it is in recognizing a subtle but foundational aspect of human cognition: our ability to situate ourselves—as a particular person, in a particular place, with a particular role. This act of “centering” isn’t just philosophical musing; it’s a cognitive prerequisite to the human ability to adapt to new settings and problems.

That insight directly shaped our latest research, “Reverse-Engineering the Centered Self.” In this paper, we build a computational framework that formalizes how humans locate themselves before acting. Unlike even the most sophisticated AI systems, which tend to break when context changes, humans excel at this flexible self-orienting. That difference has wide-reaching implications for where automation fits within organizations, as well as for how to build AI that thinks more like humans.

Julian De Freitas is an assistant professor in the Marketing Unit.

Image: AdobeStock/K Dorame