Switching off on holiday: why I packed no business books
We are taking September off. Before we go, a confession that seems to bother people more than it should. I am not taking a single business book with me. Not one. Every August my feed fills with the same photograph. Eight books on a sun lounger, spines out, all of them about strategy, or habits, or somebody’s rules for winning. I have posted a version of that picture myself. This year I am doing the opposite, and I have come round to thinking switching off on holiday is a more serious subject than the book stack it usually hides behind. Three questions before a book goes in my bag: Your fortnight away is the only honest test you get You spend the year building an operation that runs without heroics. Standard work, clear ownership, escalation that does not depend on one phone. Your two weeks away is the only unannounced test that structure ever gets. You cannot leave and pretend nothing will happen. Something always does. But there are two versions of coming home, and they tell you very different things. In the first, you return to a mess and a list of decisions that were made without you, some
