Gaining New Perspectives: Seven Books for Summer Reading

How leisurely summer reading can help new perspectives breathe. And a summer reading list for inspiration.

I love reading, and summer is a good time not only to read, but to read differently. Not only to gather more information, but to let new perspectives breathe.

This summer, I will be reading across some of the themes I am currently exploring: transformative business leadership, strategic renewal, complexity, resilience, adaptation, AI, climate change, nature loss, systems change, and the deeper human capacities needed to lead in a world that is itself being transformed.

These are not all “leadership books”. But perhaps that is the point.

The kind of leadership I am interested in now cannot be understood only by reading leadership or business literature. It also requires ecology, technology, philosophy, economics, systems thinking, neuroscience, and deeper reflection on what it means to be human in a changing world.

Here are seven books currently shaping my summer inquiry.

1. Birthing the Symbiotic Age, by Richard Flyer

I have already started reading this book after a personal invitation from the author, Richard Flyer.

That, in itself, makes the reading feel different. Less like picking up a book from a list, and more like entering into a conversation.

The word “symbiotic” immediately caught my attention. It points toward a way of living and organising that is not built on separation, extraction or isolated individual achievement, but on relationship, mutuality, trust and shared life.

For my own exploration of transformative business leadership, this feels highly relevant. If the next chapter of business is not only about adapting to external change, but about co-creating healthier futures, then symbiosis becomes an important word.

It asks how businesses, leaders, communities and ecosystems might become more mutually life-supporting.

I am already reading this book with the question: What would it mean to move from separation to symbiosis — in leadership, business and society?

2. Outgrowing Modernity, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

This book speaks to one of the deeper layers of transformation: the need to outgrow inherited ways of thinking, organising and relating that are no longer life-serving.

If business as usual no longer fits, then transformation cannot only be about innovation, acceleration and growth. It must also include maturity, accountability, letting go, compassion, and learning to see the assumptions we have inherited.

For me, this connects directly to transformative business leadership. Not as a technique, but as a developmental challenge. The next chapter will not only ask us to build something new, but also to grow beyond some of the logics that created the current crisis in the first place.

I will be reading this book with the question: What does it mean to outgrow ways of thinking and organising that no longer serve life?

3. The Laghum Economy, by Stefan Krook

Stefan Krook’s The Laghum Economy interests me because it brings the conversation about transformation into the design of the economy itself.

The idea is both simple and profound: what if the rules of the game were changed so that markets, innovation and prosperity could unfold within planetary boundaries?

Rather than treating sustainability as something businesses must add on afterwards, the Laghum Economy asks how incentives could be redesigned so that doing good for people and planet becomes part of how the system works.

For my own exploration of transformative business leadership, this is highly relevant. Business leaders operate within systems of incentives, regulation, taxation, investment logic and cultural expectations. If we want businesses to contribute to a healthier future, we also need to ask whether the surrounding economic architecture makes that easier or harder.

I will be reading this book with the question: What would change if the rules of the economy rewarded human contribution and protected the living systems we depend on?

4. Unleash Your Complexity Genius, by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Carolyn Coughlin

This book promises to speak to a paradox I see everywhere: we need creativity, connection and learning most when complexity is high, yet stress and uncertainty often make those very capacities harder to access.

For leaders, this matters deeply. Complexity cannot be met only with better analysis. It also requires nervous-system capacity, perspective-taking, experimentation, humility and collective sensemaking.

I am particularly interested in the idea that our capacity to meet complexity is not only cognitive. It is also embodied, relational and developmental.

I will be reading this book with the question: How can leaders stay wise, creative and connected when complexity increases?

5. Carbon, by Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken’s Carbon feels interesting because it seems to offer a different lens on one of the most charged words in the climate conversation.

Carbon is often discussed mainly as a problem, a pollutant or a target to reduce. But carbon is also the element of life. It moves through soil, forests, oceans, bodies, farms, food systems and the atmosphere.

I am drawn to perspectives that help us move beyond fear and abstraction into a more living understanding of climate, ecology and regeneration.

For business, this matters. If we relate to climate only through reporting, risk and compliance, we may miss the deeper invitation: to understand our place in living systems, and to redesign value creation accordingly.

I will be reading this book with the question: What changes when we understand carbon not only as a climate problem, but as part of the living fabric of Earth?

6. Co-Intelligence, by Ethan Mollick

AI is moving quickly, and many leaders are still trying to understand what it really means — not only for efficiency, but for work, judgment, learning, creativity and organisational capability. In this context, I will be reading Co-Intelligence as part of my own inquiry into how we might work with AI wisely. Not simply as a tool to do things faster, but as something that may reshape how we think, decide, learn and collaborate.

The question is not only what AI can do. It is what kind of humans and organisations we become in relationship with it. Used poorly, AI may amplify speed, noise, bias and shallow productivity. Used wisely, it may also become a thinking partner, a learning companion and a way of expanding human capacity — if we remain awake, discerning and responsible.

I will be reading this with the question: How can we use AI wisely?

7. Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

This is a book I want to read slowly.

Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and a deeply relational understanding of the living world. For me, this connects to regeneration — not as a business trend, but as a different way of seeing our place in the web of life.

I am drawn to books that help shift not only what we think, but how we perceive. In a world where nature is still too often treated as resource, backdrop or externality, Braiding Sweetgrass offers another way of relating: with gratitude, reciprocity and care.

For leaders and organisations, that may be more radical than it first appears. Because how we see the world shapes how we act in it.

I will be reading this with the question: What would change if we all related to the living world not as something outside us, but as something we belong to?

Reading as renewal

There is a deeper reason why reading matters. Reading is not only about adding more information. It is not only about collecting new perspectives or finding interesting ideas to quote later.

At its best, reading changes how we think. Quite literally.

The brain is not fixed. It changes through experience, attention, repetition and learning. Neuroscience often describes this as neuroplasticity: the capacity of the nervous system to reorganise its activity, structure and connections in response to what we experience and practice. Even reading a novel has been shown to create measurable, if still not fully understood, changes in brain connectivity, especially in networks related to language, imagination and embodied simulation.

That means reading can be part of how we develop.

When we read slowly and attentively, we enter another way of seeing. We practise taking perspectives that are not our own and stretch our imagination. We notice assumptions we did not know we held and create new associations. We give language to what we have sensed but not yet been able to articulate.

And over time, this matters. Because the future will not only ask us to know more. It will ask us to perceive differently, relate differently, decide differently and act from a wider sense of responsibility.

In that sense, reading can become a quiet form of renewal. Not escape from the world, but preparation for meeting it more wisely. And, a way of building inner capacity for what comes next.

Elisabet Lagerstedt

Elisabet Lagerstedt is the founder and director of Future Navigators. As a trusted advisor, consultant, and Executive Coach, she helps business leaders navigate beyond business as usual to build Better Business and co-create a better future - through insight, strategy, innovation, and transformation. Elisabet is also the author of Better Business, Better Future (2022) and Navigera in i Framtiden (2018).