HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY: HOTELS & BOOKS
INTRODUCTION
„Reading and writing – apparently simple tasks – play such a powerful role in the formation of a soul equally capable of invention, witness, transformation, and resistance.“*
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/arts-humanities
When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile.
He’s increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts has found that “[r]eading has declined among every group of adult Americans,” and for the first time in American history, “less than half of the U.S. adult American population is reading literature.” Literacy has been improving in countries like India and China, but that literacy may not translate into more or deeper reading.
This is terrible for leadership, where my experience suggests those trends are even more pronounced. Business people seem to be reading less — particularly material unrelated to business. But deep, broad reading habits are often a defining characteristic of our greatest leaders and can catalyze insight, innovation, empathy, and personal effectiveness.
Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an “inexhaustible interest” in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets “the original systems thinkers,” quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week. And history is littered not only with great leaders who were avid readers and writers (remember, Winston Churchill won his Nobel prize in Literature, not Peace), but with business leaders who believed that deep, broad reading cultivated in them the knowledge, habits, and talents to improve their organizations.
The leadership benefits of reading are wide-ranging. Evidence suggests reading can improve intelligence and lead to innovation and insight. Some studies have shown, for example, that reading makes you smarter through “a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge in addition to the abstract reasoning skills.” Reading — whether Wikipedia, Michael Lewis, or Aristotle — is one of the quickest ways to acquire and assimilate new information. Many business people claim that reading across fields is good for creativity. And leaders who can sample insights in other fields, such as sociology, the physical sciences, economics, or psychology, and apply them to their organizations are more likely to innovate and prosper.
Reading can also make you more effective in leading others. Reading increases verbal intelligence (PDF), making a leader a more adept and articulate communicator. Reading novels can improve empathy and understanding of social cues, allowing a leader to better work with and understand others — traits that author Anne Kreamer persuasively linked to increased organizational effectiveness, and to pay raises and promotions for the leaders who possessed these qualities. And any business person understands that heightened emotional intelligence will improve his or her leadership and management ability.
Finally, an active literary life can make you more personally effective by keeping you relaxed and improving health. For stressed executives, reading is the best way to relax, as reading for six minutes can reduce stress by 68%, and some studies suggest reading may even fend off Alzheimer’s, extending the longevity of the mind.
Reading more can lead to a host of benefits for business people of all stripes, and broad, deep reading can make you a better leader. So how can you get started? Here are a few tips:
- Join a reading group. One of my friends meets bimonthly with a group of colleagues to read classics in philosophy, fiction, history, and other areas. Find a group of friends who will do the same with you.
- Vary your reading. If you’re a business person who typically only reads business writing, commit to reading one book this year in three areas outside your comfort zone: a novel, a book of poetry, or a nonfiction piece in science, biography, history, or the arts.
- Apply your reading to your work. Are you struggling with a problem at work? Pick up a book on neuroscience or psychology and see if there are ways in which you can apply the lessons from those fields to your profession.
- Encourage others. After working on a project with colleagues, I’ll often send them a book that I think they’ll enjoy. Try it out; it might encourage discussion, cross-application of important lessons, and a proliferation of readers in your workplace.
- Read for fun. Not all reading has to be developmental. Read to relax, escape, and put your mind at ease.
Reading has many benefits, but it is underappreciated as an essential component of leadership development. So, where have you seen reading benefit your life? What suggestions would you have for others seeking to grow their leadership through reading?
Reading Books May Add Years To Your Life
We all know that books can enrich our lives, but do they have health benefits as well? And if so, does reading books have greater health advantages than reading newspapers or magazines? Researchers at Yale University School of Public Health designed a study to try to answer those questions.
The researchers studied the records of 5,635 participants in the Health and Retirement Study, an ongoing investigation of people who were 50 or older and had provided information on their reading habits when the study began. They determined that people who read books regularly had a 20% lower risk of dying over the next 12 years compared with people who weren’t readers or who read periodicals. This difference remained regardless of race, education, state of health, wealth, marital status, and depression. These findings, which were published in the September 2016 issue of Social Science & Medicine, suggest that the benefits of reading books may include a longer life in which to read them.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-aging/reading-books-may-add-years-to-your-life
Read a Book, Preserve Your Memory
It appears that activities such as reading a book or writing can help slow the rate of memory decline in old age.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/read-a-book-preserve-your-memory
IN MY DENTIST’S OFFICE, when I was a child, was a sign that ran:
Without teeth there can be no chewing.
Without chewing there can be no nourishment.
Without nourishment there can be no health.
Without health, what is life?
Its rhetoric of concatenation struck me even then as irrefutable. I’d propose a different concatenation for the humanities: without reading, there can be no learning; without learning, there can be no sense of a larger world; without the sense of a larger world, there can be no ardor to find it; without ardor, where is joy?
Without reading, there can be no learning. The humanities are essentially a reading practice. It is no accident that we say we “read” music, or that we “read” visual import. The arts (music, art, literature, theater), because they offer themselves to be “read,” generate many of the humanities—musicology, art history, literary commentary, dramatic interpretation. Through language, spoken or written, we investigate, describe, and interpret the world. The arts are, in their own realm, silent with respect to language; amply showing forth their being, they are nonetheless not self-descriptive or self-interpreting. There can be no future for the humanities—and I include philosophy and history—if there are no human beings acquainted with reading in its emotionally deepest and intellectually most extensive forms. And learning depends on reading as a practice of immersion in thought and feeling. We know that our elementary-school students cannot read with ease and enjoyment, and the same defect unsurprisingly manifests itself at every level, even in college. Without a base in alert, intense, pleasurable reading, intellectual yearning flags.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/reading-is-elemental
The Science of Reading is a comprehensive collection of topics related
to reading skills development — from the psychology of reading development to reading
instruction. The topics, reflecting the complexity inherent in the reading
processes, range from the biological bases of reading to reading comprehension,
and include disorders of reading and spelling in English and other languages.
Many leading researchers and educators in the field have contributed to this
volume, offering basic concepts as well as cutting-edge insights about reading
development.
The book is accessible to a wide range of audiences — from an educated person
who is interested in reading development to young scholars and established
leaders in the field of reading development. Each chapter provides clear and
accessible definitions of terms, builds cases for different theories and
approaches to reading development, and offers the most current understanding of
reading development.
The book starts by introducing different views on the processes involved in the
foundation of reading: written word recognition. The authors open the debate
about how we recognize printed words and retrieve their meanings using the two
leading models — the dual-route model and the connectionist model. This is
followed by a discussion of the visual and phonological aspects of reading.
Part Two of the book presents learning to read — that is, breaking the code of
the mapping between sounds and letters — as an essential step in learning to
read in languages with alphabetic writing systems. The authors emphasize the
importance of some specific subskills, such as letter-name knowledge and
phonemic sensitivity, in addition to general cognitive and verbal ability. They
also underscore the critical role of the home environment in fostering
children’s interest and ability in learning to read.
Part Three presents the processes involved in comprehending the meaning of written
texts. The authors agree that in addition to fluent word reading, reading
comprehension relies heavily on the foundation of spoken language
comprehension, such as vocabulary and inferential skills. The acquisition of
sufficient oral language skills, vocabulary in particular, remains one of the
critical challenges that many English-language learners face in learning to
read English.
The majority of our knowledge on reading development is informed by research in
reading development in English, which is on one end of a continuum with respect
to irregularities in orthography. Part Four presents findings from languages
other than English that have varying orthographic regularity. These studies
revealed some common cognitive and linguistic skills involved in learning to
read across languages, and also identified differences in the magnitude of the
relationships between linguistic skills and literacy acquisition due to oral
language and orthographic characteristics in a given language.
As much as our understanding of normal reading development informs research on
reading disabilities, research on reading disorders also informs us of the
processes involved in the normal development of reading. Part Five provides a
review of reading disorders, including biological origins and environmental
factors, employing different theoretical approaches. The authors illustrate the
intricate relationship between disorders in spoken language and reading
development.
Part Six is devoted to the biological bases of reading. There has been rapid
advancement recently in our understanding about the role of genetics in reading
disorders, revealing the powerful influences of genetic mechanisms that
underlie developmental dyslexia, in addition to environmental influences. Many
studies have identified a circuit of areas in the brain involved in reading and
the variation in brain developmental patterns that contribute to dyslexia.
However, the incorporation of these findings into the cognitive models of
reading remains a challenge.
The last part of the book discusses the application of the science of reading —
that is, teaching reading. Although only two chapters are devoted to this
important topic, the authors do a wonderful job of articulating a brief history
of the scientific evidence on the phonics versus whole-language debate and what
is known about effective ways of remediating reading difficulties. While the
authors emphasize the importance of explicitly teaching letter-sound
correspondence along with reading for meaning, they underscore the importance
of quality of teaching rather than the curriculum itself. Studies also show
that tackling reading difficulties is a great challenge: Highly intensive,
extensive, and expert teaching is required to improve reading accuracy, while
remediating difficulties in reading fluency appears to be even more
challenging.
Overall, the book is an excellent anthology of recent scientific efforts to
understand one of the essential skills for educational and life success — reading
development.
Why do reading and writing play a powerful role in the soul formation? Think of some reasons. (INTRODUCTION: ARTS & HUMANITIES)
Select a quote which you like most and interpret it. (INTRODUCTION: LIBRARY HOTEL QUOTES)
What are the reasons for installing libraries in hotels? (I HOTEL LIBRARIES)
Why and how to create a good hotel library? Is there a link between a well curated hotel library and revenues? (II BOOKS & HOTELS)
How can books help or hurt branding? (II BOOKS & HOTELS)
What are the advantages of reading? (III RESEARCH)
What is „reading“ development and why is it important for, not only educational, but also for life success? (III RESEARCH)
Make a presentation on: „How and Why Libraries Can Increase Brand Value of Hotels“.
The idea of this project is to emphasise the intellectual pleasure, beside the aesthetic enjoyment (eg.interiors) or sensual indulgence (eg. food and beverages) while staying at hotels, and how hotels respond to the intellectual requirements of their guests.
It also explains the influence of the (demanding) guests on branding.
It demonstrates how important the skill of „proper“ reading is and what for.
It helps to understand the link between intellectual satisfaction and revenues.
Eventually, it shows how hotels can seriously increase their brand value.
