Girl Scouts Leader Skips Fiction in Favor of Real-Life Leadership Tales

Anna Maria Chávez, head of the Girl Scouts of the USA, on what she reads

Her favorite publications to read on her iPad:

• Fast Company: “I’m always looking to see what companies are engaged in innovation and figuring out what matters most to consumers.”

• The New York Times

• The Washington Post: “To keep abreast of the policy issues impacting the country.”

• Harvard Business Review: “I’ve read this for years. A lot of case studies about real-life lessons in leadership, building great teams, innovation, and spotlights on CEO’s.”

• Stanford Social Innovation Review

What she has read recently:

• The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons From CEO’s on How to Lead and Succeed, by Adam Bryant: “This is one of the first books I’ve read on leadership that I would say if not 50 percent, maybe 60 percent, of the CEO’s that contributed to this book from their personal perspective were women.”

• On Becoming Fearless … in Love, Work, and Life, by Arianna Huffington: “I go back to this quite a bit. When I arrived in New York less than a year ago, Arianna was one of the first people to embrace me. She gave me this book and I love it. It talks about money and issues impacting us as human beings—parenting and personal relationships. Being the mother of a 10-year-old, I completely understand her perspective about coaching and mentoring your children to become strong.”

• Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts, by Stacy A. Cordery: “I’m a history buff—I was a history major in college—and it walks you through her leadership path. She created this organization for the empowerment of girls even before women had the right to vote. There are really some corollary issues that you can tie back to today. It’s still a hard message to sell now—allowing girls to do whatever they want to do.”

Why she reads leadership books:

“I love reading stories about other people and actual life experiences. I rarely read fiction. . I’m just so curious about learning and getting tactile and practical life experiences that I can then deploy not only for myself in the organization, but to share with people that I mentor and that are on my team. I spend a lot of time buying books, reading them, and then passing them around to my leadership team. I really try to get my leadership team to think outside of Girl Scouts.”

What she’s written:

She contributed a chapter to The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives, by Katie Couric.

Reading habit:

“I keep a leadership journal. As I read, I transfer quotes, thoughts, and names to my leadership journal and I’ll refer back to them.”

What she wishes she had more time to read:

“I’d love a subscription to Golf Magazine. I haven’t picked up a golf club in about eight months.”