Yeah, I am not your typical person probably sitting in this seat and that I, maybe I am, I am not a nonfiction, business book, sorry Tim.

For me, Atlas Shrugged was massive for me, to read that again when I was 18, I mean, I know nothing about US politics and I [couldn’t] care less about the Tea Party and all the way that people — because I had no context that it was a philosophy, I just thought it was a book. When I read through the book and I really got about how to make a quality product, how to treat people really well, how not to let the naysayers say you can’t do it, or that if you do make your money, “Give me part of that money because why should you have it all?” type of thing. I didn’t really get it until I was about 52 or 53 and I read the book again and I recognized what an incredible impact that it had on my life. And I think it falls part and parcel with that good to great. What is good and what is great? And do you want to do — did I possibly want to live a life of being good at something? No, I want to be great, because on my deathbed, why would I want to know what good looks like? I want to know what great looks like.

Oh, I mean, there’s one that I actually gifted to you that I especially love.

You know, the one that you mentioned, the Seven-Day Weekend , as with many other books, is a good place to poke around also inside your own head and to look for some insights. When I wrote the book originally, Brazil was still a relatively closed, elite environment for businesspeople, etc. Obviously because the book has sold a good quantity, most people had read it and I kept giving autographs to taxi drivers and so on so it was a very small microcosm I was living in. I remember the second occasion this happened to me, which was being stopped on the street and somebody saying, “You know, I read your book and it changed my life.” And they would go off and quote somebody else’s book entirely. When this happened the second time, I said shit, this is not about me at all. So, let me stop right here. And of course at that point there were all kinds of campaigns for me to run for mayor, and for president, and become Brazil’s Trump. Because people get lost along the way and they start believing in their own bullshit. The interesting thing here, going back to the issue of the book, was it’s when you come across an insight which was already yours and you see it in writing, that’s when you say this book changed my life. But real insight is where you go there and you say geez, I never thought of that, and there is some of that; it has to add to something that you believe in or that jives with your moment. So, I think putting too much weight and too much importance on something that you got out of someone doesn’t remind us that this intuition and this insight was growing inside you already; you were just waiting for some clarification of it. But that kind of answers the second bit. I had talked for several years at the Sloane School at MIT and I had a group of MBAs. This was always a very fun group and I used to go there in the fall quarter. I’d tell them: look, this is what you have to read to understand business and organizations. I was obliged to make this available on the MIT site and the books that were there were Marco Polo’s Travel, one book, a Kafka parable, a Jung book on synchronicity and so forth. These kinds of books – and Kafka I think is extraordinary – give you an enormous insight into the people who are doing things and why they’re doing things, rather than the whole set of how-tos. When you run away from the how-tos into the issue of how do you get to real wisdom, we’ve been at this for a long time. We’ve been in this agricultural era, then we were in the industrial era, then we were in the information age and we were in the knowledge age. But we don’t get any closer to the age of wisdom, and something is terribly wrong for a population and the humanity that has been around for so long and doesn’t get closer to wisdom. When you think about organizations and I ask you to show me one democratic organization or business environment in the world, or to find one wise company as a company, these are all almost impossible to find. So, to answer your question, I would say the books that stop to think about why the heck do we do the things that we do which are in Kafka and Freud or in Jung or in Thoreau; I think those will answer the business world much closer than people think. When they say oh, great, that’s all good and well but that’s all philosophy and all airy-fairy and touchy-feely but I need to get down to answer this: how come, which people, how, and so forth. But this process I think is much, much stronger from a philosophical point of what makes you want to get up in the morning and how you let the other people around you do what they want to do how they want to do it, and get out of their way. That is a philosophical issue that I think would solve a lot more issues if people went from that filter onwards, you know?