December 2, 2012 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Andrew Watt, chief executive of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, on what he reads and why he reads it.
Publications he reads for his job, mainly through Facebook feeds:
• The Economist
• Harvard Business Review
• Stanford Social Innovation Review
Why he reads these magazines: “I’m looking for new business concepts, new ways of doing business, and how to develop a new business culture. For AFP, I’m looking for thought leadership. Ultimately, we spend an awful lot of time talking about tactics, but we don’t talk about what we are and what we’re doing. I’m looking for things that will help me learn how better to put that message across.”
Favorite print publications to read outside of work:
• The New York Review of Books
• The New Yorker
• The New York Times
His recent discovery: Project Gutenberg, a digital library that includes mostly books in the public domain. “I have found myself reading a huge amount of stuff that’s out of copyright over the last few months, and that would include virtually the entire works of Anthony Trollope, a lot of 18th-century essays, and poetry. Poetry’s great when you’re traveling because it’s episodic. You can pick it up, put it down, and it has that ability, rather like music, to take you away from your surroundings.”
Why he enjoys re-reading books: “You can read something because you’re forced to at school and not enjoy it or get anything out of it at all, but as soon as it’s your own choice or you’re in the right frame of mind, you’ll view it completely differently.”
Books he has recently revisited:
• Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Book he wishes he read earlier in his career: Relationship Fundraising: A Donor-Based Approach to the Business of Raising Money, by Ken Burnett
Why: Because he doesn’t think fundraisers put enough focus on understanding how people work.
Best advice he ever received from something he has read: The British writer Rudyard Kipling “was a great proponent of understanding that you are there to serve others and not necessarily yourself.”
Common theme in the books he reads: “I’m a people person. I love people watching—it’s one of the compensations of traveling. A lot of what I read tends to speak to that.”
Favorite online bookstore: AbeBooks. “They have out-of-print books. It’s like a candy store, really.”
