By Karin Mugnaini
In a world obsessed with speed, contemporary fiction offers leaders a rare opportunity to slow down, reconnect with themselves and understand others more deeply.Â
What Can Fiction Offer Leaders in a World That Never Stops?
It is not unusual for me to talk about the latest books I have read, even in business meetings. Almost magically, the conversation takes on a different energy. Even among business leaders, it moves into a quieter space: one of reflection, curiosity and connection. Perhaps this is what drew me to WoW Gstaad, the literary festival held in the beautiful Swiss mountain setting where time seems almost to stand still. Founder Thomas D. Gommes aims to encourage a wider appreciation of literature and the role stories can play in all our lives. Bringing together world-renowned authors and outstanding moderators, the festival creates space to listen, question and think. It also raises an intriguing question: what can contemporary fiction offer business leaders beyond inspiration – and why might the simple act of reading matter as much as the stories themselves?
Why Should Business Leaders Make Time for Fiction?
I once heard a banker declare boldly that all bankers should read novels. I would extend that argument to leaders across every industry.
Business leaders understandably turn to management literature for frameworks, strategies and practical advice. Yet leadership is not simply an exercise in analysis. It is about people: understanding their motivations, navigating conflicting interests, building trust and making decisions in situations where the answers are rarely straightforward.
Fiction offers a different kind of insight. Through the lives of fictional characters, we encounter ambition, vulnerability, rivalry, loyalty and moral dilemmas. We experience situations from perspectives that may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable, without needing to resolve them immediately.
But there is another, perhaps less obvious, reason to read.
Business life is increasingly organized around speed. Emails and phone calls demand immediate responses, meetings follow one another, information arrives continuously, and decisions are expected quickly. Even moments that might once have allowed us to think have become opportunities to check a screen or catch up on work.
Reading fiction invites us to step outside this rhythm. It asks us to stay with a story, follow its development and give our attention to something that does not necessarily demand an immediate response.
In that sense, reading is not simply an opportunity to acquire knowledge. It is also an opportunity to reclaim our attention.
What Happens When We Slow Down to Read?
Even the fastest reader must engage with a story as it unfolds. Our eyes move across the page, but our minds are doing much more: interpreting language, imagining settings, following relationships, anticipating possibilities and reconsidering what we thought we understood.
Reading speed and mental stillness are not contradictory. We may turn pages quickly while remaining absorbed in a world that feels far removed from the urgency of our daily responsibilities.
Research in cognitive neuroscience shows that reading involves interacting brain systems responsible for language, memory, attention and the construction of meaning. Research into fiction also suggests that becoming emotionally engaged with a story can support aspects of social understanding, although these effects are neither automatic nor identical for every reader.
A useful starting point is the research published in PLOS ONE in January 2013, How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation by P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0055341), which explored how engagement with fiction relates to empathy. Its findings suggest that the experience of becoming immersed in a story matters; simply reading words on a page does not guarantee a particular psychological outcome.
For leaders, the value of this process may lie partly in the space it creates between receiving information and reacting to it.
When we read, we can pause over a sentence, return to a passage or remain with an unresolved question. We can allow an idea to develop without immediately translating it into an action point.
This is a different rhythm from the business day, where attention is frequently divided and reflection can feel like a luxury.
Reading offers something deceptively simple: a moment in which we do not have to respond, decide or perform. We can simply pay attention.
Why Does Silence Matter in Leadership?
Silence is not always comfortable in business. A pause in a meeting may feel awkward. An unanswered question may be interpreted as uncertainty. A moment without activity can create the impression that nothing is happening.
Yet meaningful thinking often requires precisely this kind of space.
When we read fiction, we enter a private conversation with the text. We imagine what a character might be feeling, question their choices and sometimes recognize something of ourselves in their contradictions. We may disagree with a character, only to discover a few chapters later that our initial judgement was incomplete.
This process encourages contemplation rather than immediate evaluation. It allows us to sit with ambiguity and acknowledge that human behavior is rarely explained by a single motive.
For leaders, that capacity matters. Difficult workplace situations seldom come with clear distinctions between right and wrong, rational and irrational, or ambitious and self-serving. People act from a combination of personal histories, pressures, beliefs and emotions.
A novel cannot tell us how to resolve a particular organizational conflict. But it can remind us to look beyond our first interpretation.
Perhaps a colleague’s resistance to change reflects more than a lack of commitment. Perhaps a disagreement is rooted in competing ideas of fairness. Perhaps the story we tell ourselves about a decision leaves out the experience of those who must live with its consequences.
The pause that reading creates does not necessarily produce an answer. Sometimes it produces a better question. And in leadership, that can be a valuable outcome in itself.
Do Novelists Find Inspiration in the Business World?
The relationship between literature and business runs in both directions. While leaders can find insight in fiction, novelists can also draw inspiration from the dynamics of professional life.
Businesses bring together ambition, power, money, status and competing interests. They expose the tensions between personal values and collective expectations, between success and sacrifice, and between what people say they believe and how they actually behave.
These are fertile subjects for storytelling because they are fundamentally human dilemmas.
The themes explored at WoW Gstaad offered a particularly rich starting point for considering these connections. Discussions ranging from Money, Families and the Stories We Tell Ourselves to The Power of the Narrative: Books, Art and How We See Ourselves opened up different ways of thinking about identity, relationships and the assumptions that shape our lives.
Money, for instance, is never simply about numbers. It can represent heritage, freedom, security, recognition or control. Family relationships can illuminate questions of loyalty and inheritance, while stories about ambition can expose the personal costs of pursuing success.
For business leaders, these themes are immediately recognizable. A family business may struggle to balance commercial decisions with personal loyalties. An executive may confuse professional achievement with personal worth. An organization may continue to follow an inherited narrative long after the circumstances that created it have changed.
Fiction allows us to explore such situations without reducing them to management formulas. It makes visible the emotional and social dimensions of decisions that might otherwise be viewed only through performance indicators.
The question is not simply whether novelists find inspiration in business. It is whether business leaders are willing to look beyond their own professional vocabulary to discover what stories can reveal.
How Can Leaders Bring the Benefits of Reading Into Their Lives?
The answer is not to turn reading into another productivity exercise. If every novel becomes a task to complete, a lesson to extract or a skill to optimize, we risk reproducing the very pace from which reading can offer a respite.
Instead, leaders might approach fiction with curiosity and a willingness to be surprised.
A few simple practices can help:
- Protect a little uninterrupted time. Even a short period of reading without notifications can create a welcome change of pace.
- Choose stories beyond your usual world. Encounter different cultures, generations, experiences and perspectives.
- Resist the urge to look for immediate lessons. Let the story unfold without requiring every chapter to deliver a practical takeaway.
- Allow yourself to reflect. Notice which characters, decisions or passages stay with you after you have closed the book.
- Share the experience. Discussing a novel with colleagues can open conversations about trust, ambition, fairness and responsibility in ways that conventional business discussions sometimes struggle to achieve.
Above all, reading should remain an invitation rather than an obligation. Its value lies not in the number of books completed but in the attention we give them and the thoughts they leave behind.
What Might Contemporary Authors Teach Leaders?
The authors gathered at WoW Gstaad represent an opportunity to explore these questions more deeply. What do novelists observe about the business world? How do they approach the themes of power, money, identity and human relationships? And what might they say to leaders about the value of reading their work?
An author exploring family relationships might offer a fresh perspective on loyalty and succession. A writer interested in identity might challenge our assumptions about authority and self-perception. Another, examining money and social status, might prompt questions about the values organizations reward.
Their insights need not take the form of explicit leadership advice. Indeed, their value may lie in resisting easy answers.
A series of conversations with contemporary novelists could explore what inspires their stories, how they portray the dilemmas of modern life and what readers in positions of responsibility might discover in their work. The aim would not be to turn fiction into a management manual, but to create a dialogue between two worlds that have more in common than we sometimes imagine.
And perhaps the most important question to ask these authors is not only what we can learn from their books, but what happens to us when we make time to read them.
Conclusion
Sometimes, Leadership Begins With a Pause.
Leadership requires action, but it also requires reflection. It calls for decisiveness, but also the humility to reconsider our assumptions and understand perspectives beyond our own. Contemporary fiction offers an opportunity to practice that balance. It invites us into other people’s worlds while creating a rare space for silence, contemplation and thought. In a business culture that often equates speed with progress, perhaps reading a novel is a quietly radical act. Not because every story contains a leadership lesson, but because every reading experience gives us the chance to slow down, pay attention and see the world a little differently.
Karin Mugnaini
