Our 2025 book recommendations for investment communications pros

Fresh from the holiday break, it’s time for my annual book recommendations.

I have a love/hate relationship with books. While I spend considerable time outside of work buried in them—sometimes relaxing and other times learning—I often wonder how much more I might have accomplished had I spent less time reading! I also question whether books are becoming anachronistic. Should I be immersing myself in ChatGPT or Perplexity instead?

My younger colleagues glean their news and information from TikTok and YouTube. Others, like my colleague Pat Allen, gravitate to PDFs downloaded free from the internet. Yet I remain nostalgically committed to reading books from cover to cover. I rarely abandon a book once I start and carefully curate my reading list to avoid poorly written or boring books.

So, I share here a few tomes that are worth the investment.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is a comprehensive biography of Elon Musk that preceded his headline-dominating support for President-Elect Trump and the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Like all Isaacson’s subjects, Musk emerges as a complex and nuanced individual. The book documents his drive and creativity alongside his complicated upbringing, personal life and often conflicting business and political aspirations.

For communicators working with strong-personality business leaders, Isaacson’s work offers valuable insights into understanding such complicated figures.

How to Know a Person and Supercommunicators

Two essential reads this year are David Brook’s How to Know a Person: The art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen and Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators: How to unlock the secret language of connection. Both explore crucial communications skills, emphasizing the power of listening and asking meaningful questions. These books are invaluable to helping financial professionals better connect with clients or helping portfolio managers deliver resonant messages that reach their intended audiences. (Note: This is the second book I’ve recommended by Brooks. The Road to Character made last year’s list and is one of my all-time favorites.)

How to Retire

Over the years, many of the financial journalists we work with have penned books. How to Retire by Morningstar’s Christine Benz compiles interviews with financial experts exploring all aspects of retirement. Benz is a leading expert in her own right, offering smart takeaways after each chapter.

I’d also strongly recommend her recent interview with Jonathan Clements whose book, My Money Journey, I recommended last year. Benz talked with Clements about his recent cancer diagnosis, the steps he’s taken to make sure his family will be well cared for, and his honest and heartbreaking assessment of his own end-of-life lessons.

All the Worst Humans

All the Worst Humans: How I made news for dictators, tycoons and politicians by Phil Elwood documents his career as a hack serving despicable humans, and provides a sometimes hilarious, often disturbing memoir of PR work with questionable clients. He describes how big money clients can distort reality and how news-seeking journalists play along.

As a PR pro focused on the financial and investment industry, I’m grateful to have worked with legit clients and avoided Ellwood’s influence-peddling Washington, D.C. milieu. While the same tactics Elwood used to embrace the news cycle and get breaking news in front of the right journalist apply to financial PR, we prefer to work with upstanding people and pitch useful stories.

Fierce Ambition

Fierce Ambition: The life & times of war correspondent Maggie Higgins, Jennet Conant’s biography of self-made journalist Maggie Higgins’ amazing career spans the end of World War II all the way to the Vietnam War. Higgins’ tenacity in male-dominated war zones broke ground for female journalists and later gained her fame and a Pulitzer Prize. PR pros may appreciate the insights the book offers into journalism’s evolution. Higgins’ hard work, scrappiness and reputation as a hellion also make for an inspiring read.

Looking ahead

I’m currently a few pages into Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world by Parmy Olson, the 2024 Business Financial Times Book of Year. It chronicles the competition between Sam Altman’s Open AI and Demis Hassabis’s DeepMind to build super intelligent machines. It is particularly relevant as AI reshapes communication and search optimization.

Your thoughts on these recommendations? Got any more suggestions? Send me a note. I’d love to hear from you!