The book club problem
getting your colleagues to read your favourite book 2026-06-16 #reading #books
If you enjoyed failing to start a tech blog at your company, then maybe you’ll like the idea of starting a book club with your colleagues. After all, book clubs bring people together in a social learning experience, and they sound fun. At least, book nerds think they do. However, you would have to solve a problem first.
The book club problem
Most of us don’t have time for a book club in our spare time. I imagine that I miss out on tea and cake with a tight-knit group (who also knit), and wholesome unpretentious literary discussion on a weekday evening. Or maybe I do have time, and already read several books every month, but can’t face reading terrible books that other people chose, much less making polite conversation about them.
At work, nobody has free time. To start a book club with your colleagues, you need to solve two hard problems:
- getting people to read a specific book in their own time
- management approval, tacit or otherwise, for regular book club meetings.
If you don’t meet during work hours, you and your colleagues would find yourselves self-organising out-of-hours training. Don’t do that. Instead, develop book club tactics.
Not reading the books
If you can justify spending working hours on book club meetings, perhaps because people should talk to each other more, you might increase participation by dropping the requirement to actually read the selected book. You could tell people not to worry if they haven’t read the relevant chapters before each meeting, and that they can still discuss them with people who have.
Ideally, you don’t have to read the books yourself, and book club meetings will become expert briefings, where your colleagues explain the books. This tactic relies on the insights in Pierre Bayard’s book, How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, translated from the French, Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus ?
Reading one book
You also don’t need to read the book club’s selection if you’ve already read it, obviously. Whether this insight helps depends on whether you want a book club to introduce you to new and surprising books, or whether you just want your colleagues to read a particular book.
Minimalist user interfaces might make you wish that the design team would read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and learn to love Edward Tufte’s data-ink ratio, for example. In this case, you don’t need to read the book; you don’t even need a book club. You need a fake book club that targets designers, and will disband after a single book (that you choose).
Book club as a service
Hiring someone to facilitate a book club may sound implausible. But consider that for many books, 8–16 hours to read and discuss the book would have more impact than the average 1–2 day classroom training course. Indeed, the value of much company training lies in the dedicated time to focus on a topic, and the opportunity to discuss it with colleagues or industry peers.
Leaders could do worse than buy all staff a copy of their favourite book, every year. Enough people would read it to make this more effective than the same amount spent on the average training course.
