Which book do you recommend most often to others, and what makes you pass it on?

I think the one that has had the biggest impact on me and the one that I’ve given the most number of people has been [The Better Angels of Our Nature] . And [The Better Angels of Our Nature] is a 700-page book on death. And it’s written by a brilliant Harvard professor who talks at great length about death rates and the human condition. And he spends a lot of time talking about what happened 200, 300, 400, 500 years ago. And when you finish the book, which takes a long time, you conclude that the world is in a much, much better place than it has been in the past, that a thousand years ago, the average man died in a war and the average woman died in pregnancy in their 20s, and that a child born today has a very high likelihood in almost all parts of the world to live to a natural old age. That’s an extraordinary statement. And that’s why the people who run around saying, “Oh, the world’s falling apart. We’ve never had it this bad.” That’s just not true. And the data says it’s not true.

I have reasons for each of those books and certainly The Invisible Man in this moment of the Black Lives Matter protests and the continuing racial reckoning. Invisible Man really taught me to not see through anybody ever. But the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning , where he really looks at people in the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us. And so I think that we have to be reminded right now that, between stimulus and response, there is a choice. And we’re in that moment. And I have seen myself personally so often that in the darkest times we can find our best selves and that’s our opportunity right now. And so I think for this moment, Tim, Man’s Search for Meaning should be required reading for all of us.

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.

Well, outside of our cookbooks and Setting the Table , which is the most gift I give because someone’s got to give it, I love marketing. I just love marketing because marketing is understanding the other person. Marketing is a dialogue. It’s a lot like hospitality. And I love Seth Godin’s books. And I would say that I’ve given many of his books, but probably the one that I’ve given the most is This Is Marketing . And it comes down to one simple express — He’s just so brilliant at getting to the essence of what something really is. And he thinks marketing is when you can convey that people like us do things like this. And that sounds so simple, and yet it’s so deep actually. He understands that people want to feel — I believe that the biggest longing people have is to belong. And so great marketing actually doesn’t just sell you something. It makes you feel like you belong to a tribe. So anyway, long answer to your question, but that would be the one.

One of our board members gave me this book called The Infinite Game , and it’s the original infinite game book. There’s some follow ons from it about how to implement the infinite game, so I forget the original author.