Suggested Readings (Acumen Fellows Reading List)

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Acumen Fund Fellows Reading List

The Acumen Fund Fellows Program is designed to build a core of next-generation leaders with the business skills and moral imagination to create innovative solutions to poverty. The program develops capabilities such as empathy, self-awareness, and a business mind-set during an 11-week training program and a 9-month placement at a social enterprise in India, Pakistan, or East Africa. The Fellows Reading List is drawn from diverse disciplines and with support and inspiration from the Aspen Institute, for the purpose of guiding the fellows to uncover their unique leadership styles. Fellows engage in dialogue with their cohorts and leaders in the social sector about each other’s skills, values, and views on human nature. The diversity of historical and current perspectives in the readings can help all leaders shape their vision of how to create change in the world today.

Good Society Readings
Leadership Readings
Fiction
Books on Innovative Solutions for Poverty Alleviation

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GOOD SOCIETY READINGS

Rights and Responsibilities

“Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew” by Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994)

“Empowerment for a Culture of Peace and Development” by Aung San Suu Kyi (address to World Commission on Culture and Development, November 21, 1994)

“Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr. (April 16, 1963)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948)

Liberty and Social Order

“The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer” by Wendell Berry in Farming: A Hand Book (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich)

“Democracy” by Langston Hughes

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

“Message to the Congress of Angostura, 1819” by Simón Bolívar

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

“Two Concepts of Liberty” by Isaiah Berlin (address before University of Oxford, October 31, 1958)

Equality and the Quest for Social Justice

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela by Nelson Mandela (Little, Brown and Company)

“O Yes” by Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Riddle (Random House)

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Community and the Search for Humanity

The Book of Genesis

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism

“How to Write about Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina (Granta 92, Winter 2005)

On Identity by Amin Maalouf (Harvill Panther)

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin)

“Speech upon Receiving the Philadelphia Liberty Medal” by Václav Havel (July 4, 1994)

Property and Productivity

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)

Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by Arthur M. Okun (The Brookings Institution)

The Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldūn (Princeton University Press)

The Republic by Plato

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LEADERSHIP READINGS

“Because We Can, We Must” by Bono (commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania, May 17, 2004)

A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka (W.W. Norton)

“A Far Cry from Africa” by Derek Walcott in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (W.W. Norton)

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (HarperCollins)

“Great Expectations” by Bill Gates (commencement address at Harvard University, June 7, 2007)

Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky (Harvard Business School Press)

Leading from Within: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Lead by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner (Jossey-Bass)

Letter to Daniel: Dispatches from the Heart by Fergal Keane (Penguin Books)

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin (Harvard Business School Press)

“Rebellion” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov

Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society by John W. Gardner (HarperCollins)

Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness by Robert K. Greenleaf (Paulist Press)

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FICTION

Black Boy by Richard Wright (HarperPerennial)

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (Vintage International)

A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Heinemann)

Independent People by Halldór Laxness (Vintage International)

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (Penguin Books)

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin (Creative Education)

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor)

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (NYRB Classics)

Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh (Mariner Books)

Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell (Penguin Books)

The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Heinemann)

Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh (Grove Press)

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BOOKS ON INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR POVERTY ALLEVIATION

“A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty” by Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir (American Economic Review 94, no. 2)

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (Oxford University Press)

Capitalism as if the World Matters by Jonathon Porritt and Amory B. Lovins (Earthscan Publications)

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Penguin Press)

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits by C.K. Prahalad (Wharton School Publishing)

Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Norton)

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Knopf)

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Hernando de Soto (Basic Books)

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer (University of California Press)

Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Bloomsbury Press)

Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Norton)

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven (Princeton University Press)

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by Williams Russell Easterly (Penguin Books)

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio Hardcover)

The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press)