September 2026 | Reading List

What We’re Reading: Faculty on Books Worth Your Time

Every leader has a stack of books bought with good intentions and a much shorter list of ones actually finished. To help you choose a new one you’ll not only finish but also benefit from, we asked Wharton faculty what they have read lately that’s worth sharing. Their answers cross disciplines and genres, and each one arrives with a reason. Consider it a shortlist for the waning days of summer.

Raghu Iyengar, marketing professor and academic director of Analytics for Strategic Growth: AI, Smart Data, and Customer Insights, recommends The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, by Maya Shankar (Riverhead Books, 2026). “It’s all about resilience and yet being ready to change when the context requires it,” he says. “It is this juxtaposition of change and resilience that makes it a great read.”

Jonah Berger says “we all want to be more effective communicators, and Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection [by Charles Duhigg, Random House, 2024] provides great practical advice to help us get there, illustrated through powerful stories.” The best-selling author of Magic Words (Harper Business, 2023) and three other books also recommends Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Random House, 2007). Berger calls it a “classic work on how to communicate ideas in ways people can understand, remember, and act on. I’m constantly recommending it to students and clients.”

Finance professor Itay Goldstein says, “Learning from history is critical for risk management.” To that end, the academic director of Advanced Corporate Finance suggests 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, and How it Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking, 2025). He adds, “There is nothing like the history of the greatest financial crisis to help us understand some of the fragilities we might be facing now.”

Gad Allon, the Jeffrey A. Keswin Professor and professor of operations, information and decisions, finds a “useful frame” in an unusual source. He says, “Fernand Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life [Harper & Row, 1982] is the book I’d hand anyone who feels a little dizzy from the pace of AI news. Braudel’s whole point is that most of what shapes our lives moves slowly. Food, tools, towns, money, the daily rhythms of work: these took centuries to shift, and they quietly set the limits on what any new invention could actually do.”

The academic director of Business Essentials for Executives and Scaling Business for Profitable Growth continues, “That's a useful frame right now. AI matters, but the hype treats every release as a rupture. Braudel teaches you to ask which layer is really moving: the noisy surface of announcements, or the slow ground underneath. Usually, the slow ground wins. And it's a great read on its own: strange, specific, full of how people actually lived. I think you finish it humbler about predictions and clearer about what's worth watching.”

Management professor Zeke Hernandez calls After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (Simon and Schuster, 2025) “a refreshing, data-driven angle on why humans are good for the world.” Hernandez’s work sits at the intersection of immigration and business, and he teaches in Effective Execution of Organizational Strategy, among other programs. His own book, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers (St Martin’s Griffin, 2026), just came out in paperback.

If you’re looking for a recommendation from a Broadway legend, look no further than Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need To Get More of What You Want (Little, Brown Spark, 2025). The book, by Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy Judd Kessler, is described by Lin-Manuel Miranda as “that rarest of things: an economics PAGE-TURNER." Lucky By Design shows that luck isn't magic — it's often just what happens when you understand the game better than everyone else.

Marketing professor Pete Fader says, “I just bought (and started to read) an excellent new book by David Epstein: Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better [Riverhead, 2026]. While it has no direct or obvious relationship with my work on customer centricity, there is a clear connection here — one that I’ve thought and talked about for years.”

“Many companies have a hard time getting their managers to ‘focus on the right customers’ (i.e., the subtitle of my first book, Customer Centricity, Wharton School Press, 2020),” Fader says. “They would rather think broadly about products and services that appeal to the entire customer base. It’s a battle I’ve been fighting for years, and every now and then I find an example of a company that has managed to do this well. But I’ve never seen any comprehensive coverage about this topic — until now. Epstein hits the nail on the head over and over, with great examples that not only validate my thinking on this issue, but raise it to new heights. I plan to reach out to him to discuss our overlapping interests in the topic — and that’s the ultimate compliment.”

Witold Henisz, vice dean and faculty director of Wharton’s Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business Initiative, says, “I loved The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by John Fabian Witt because it highlighted how in a previous historical period of enormous polarization, political violence, and debate about civil liberties and minority rights, a group of committed organizations advanced an agenda that would eventually contribute to major social change. It wasn’t easy. They themselves were often divided and fell into infighting and factions, but they still made substantive progress. A positive message in dark times.”

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