Lockdown reading: SAMCO Securities & StockNote CEO learnt valuable lessons from Bob Iger's 'The Ride Of A Lifetime'

Jimeet Modi, Founder and CEO, SAMCO Securities & StockNote has been reading one book a week during the lockdown phase.
He told ET Panache, "A few really interesting books I’ve read in this period are 'The Ride of Lifetime' by Bob Iger, Ex Walt Disney CEO and 'What you do is who you are' by Ben Horowitz.

One of the biggest learnings from Bob Iger’s book was how he lays down a few key leadership lessons especially about ability and failure. The biggest takeaway was how and why as business leaders - we should be valuing an individuals' ability far more than experience and how we should take risks of assigning roles to people despite knowing that it might be stretch for them. Also, as business leaders wanting to drive innovation, it’s important to get comfortable with the idea of failure as long as there was no lack of effort. Iger said, 'You need to grant permission to fail' and that’s something that’s stuck with me."

In his mind, books are an asset with practically an infinite return on investment. "Reading helps me broaden my vision and perspective. It helps me think about things I wouldn’t be thinking about in my normal routine. The way I think about it is, reading a book could probably take up a few hours or days of one’s life but the ability to think with a different perspective could change several years of one’s life. It’s a no brainer trade - trading years for hours," Modi said.

The CEO of SAMCO Securities & StockNote ends up spending anywhere between three to four hours reading each day.

"Books allow me to take my mind off routine. While working from home, it’s very important that one switches off from work from time to time and books really help as an escape route and from getting worn out due to WFH life," he said.

While Modi is comfortable with both ebooks and physical books, his personal preference is towards physical books.

"With physical books, I can make notes and add comments in margins, highlight and underline things I find important and doing so physically, it helps me remember stuff a lot better than doing these things in an ebook. Also, in work from home life, we are anyway spending a whole lot of time in front of our 'screens'. Physical books are a very pleasant break from otherwise excessive 'screen time' during lockdown," he ended.