5 Books Indian CEOs Say Changed How They Think

Most "books entrepreneurs love" lists recycle the same five paperbacks no matter who is supposedly attached to them. The five names below said these titles themselves, in a tweet, a podcast, or an interview, and each pairing traces back to that specific moment rather than to guesswork.

First, Nikhil Kamath, whose reading runs from a Chinese dictator's biography to two and a half thousand years of Western thought. Zerodha's co-founder recently shared a seven-book reading list covering money, politics, and human behavior, and among the titles were a biography of Deng Xiaoping, a memoir on financial inequality by former trader Gary Stevenson, and Bertrand Russell's sweep through the history of Western philosophy, which Kamath included for the context it gives on the ideas still shaping politics and economics today.

Deepinder Goyal's answer is narrower and more practical. On a podcast appearance with TRS Clips Hindi, Zomato and Eternal's founder named Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly as the book he gives away most often, crediting its catalogue of cognitive biases and reasoning errors with the kind of rational decision-making he says helped the company stay focused through its international expansion rather than chasing every market at once.

Anand Mahindra has spent years turning his own timeline into an informal book club, and in June 2021 he pointed followers toward Barack Obama's A Promised Land, calling an autobiography a page-turner and comparing its pace to a thriller, with the added note that it offers a rare study in the careful exercise of enormous power.

N.R. Narayana Murthy's pick breaks from business reading altogether. The Infosys co-founder has been publicly pushing for Paul G. Hewitt's high-school physics textbook, Conceptual Physics, to be translated into every major Indian language, describing it as absolutely brilliant for the way it teaches complicated ideas through plain exercises rather than dense theory.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's recommendation stays inside the founder world but points sideways rather than up. In July 2021 the Biocon chairperson used her own Twitter account to direct other entrepreneurs to Harsh Realities, Marico chairman Harsh Mariwala's account of his own business struggles, writing that anyone convinced nobody understands the pressure of building a company should read it and feel less alone.

Set against each other, the five split in a fairly readable way. Three of them, the Russell, the Dobelli, and arguably the Obama, are less about specific tactics than about thinking clearly under pressure, which lines up with how often these same leaders talk publicly about judgement and noise as the actual scarce resource in running a company. The other two look outward instead, toward a physics textbook written for teenagers and a fellow founder's account of his own setbacks, which says something about where these two went looking once the standard business-book shelf stopped being useful to them.