A book club for the C-suite who make the final call, and would rather discuss what they learn with other business leaders who can unpack how to apply it to their organisation.
Request an introductionAt a certain level, honest advice becomes scarce.Your board has a stake in the outcome, and your team has a stake in your approval. Your advisers bill by the hour.
The CEO Chapter is a book club of leaders who want nothing from your decisions, recommendations and insights, except a good conversation about them.
Each month, members put forward the books that have shaped how they lead. Three make the shortlist, and the group votes. We read one, then meet behind closed doors, virtually, to discuss what it means for the companies around the table.
Each quarter, we invite the author of one of the books we have read to join us. They talk through the thinking behind the book, and answer the practical questions that come from members who have tried to put it to work in their own businesses: what held up, what broke, and what the author would do differently in our position.
Conversations are held under the Chatham House Rule.
Membership is by invitation or by nomination from a current member, and every request is reviewed for fit with the group.
Book-summary apps promise the ideas in fifteen minutes. What they deliver is the conclusion without the reasoning, and the reasoning is where judgement is built. A leader rarely fails for lack of information. They fail because they did not think a problem through. The CEO Chapter treats reading as a discipline, the way you would treat training or governance, because the effort is the point.
Every member reads it in full, on their own time, before we meet. No summaries, no skimming the highlights.
Before the session, each member marks one idea that applies to their company and one they think would fail there. The book becomes a lens on real decisions, not a topic for conversation.
We meet with seasoned chief executives and directors who have run the numbers, sat on the boards and made the hard calls. They challenge how the idea would work in practice, what it would cost and what it would break. You leave with a decision, not a reading list. Once a quarter, the author joins us, and the questions go straight to the source.
Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf’s research shows that sustained reading develops inference, analogical thinking and critical analysis, the processes leaders rely on in ambiguous situations. Habitual skimming weakens them.
Source: Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home (2018)
Researchers at Yale found that people consistently overestimate how well they understand things until they are asked to explain them step by step. A summary gives the conclusion and the confidence, but not the knowledge underneath.
Source: Rozenblit and Keil, Cognitive Science (2002)
Learning that feels harder, such as working through an argument yourself, produces far stronger long-term retention than learning that feels easy. Psychologists call these desirable difficulties.
Source: Robert Bjork, UCLA
Recalling and explaining what you have read strengthens memory more than rereading it. Every conversation in the room does that work.
Source: Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science (2006)
A meta-analysis of 54 studies and more than 170,000 readers found better comprehension of informational text on paper than on screens, especially when readers were under time pressure.
Source: Delgado et al., Educational Research Review (2018)
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time. None, zero.”
Every member brings answers to the same three questions to every session.
Reading is done alone. Understanding is done together.
Three books, put forward by members. Read the summaries, then cast your vote below.
Ben Horowitz
In one line
A founder's account of leading when every option is a bad one.
Three ideas
Read it if
You are leading through a period where every choice has a cost.
Dan Sullivan and Dr Benjamin Hardy
In one line
Why aiming ten times higher can mean doing less, not more.
Three ideas
Read it if
You are busy and successful, but no longer growing the way you want.
Paul Cheek
In one line
How AI is changing what a company is, not just how fast it runs.
Three ideas
Read it if
You suspect your organisation was designed for the last decade.
One vote per member. The result is shown once your vote is counted.
Current bookclub is full, with leaders across ASX listed companies, media, consulting and Technology.