The claim that the average CEO reads sixty books a year gets repeated often enough in business content that it's worth checking against the source, and the source turns out to be thinner than the statistic suggests. Fortune's 2026 reporting (opens in new tab) traces the figure to a single 2013 blog post with no supporting study behind it, since inflated into something closer to established fact through sheer repetition. What the actual research shows is more modest: at least a quarter of American adults don't read any books in a given year, while the roughly 20% of the population considered avid readers average around 12 books annually, a book a month, not five a week.
It's not about reading more. It's about reading in a way that changes a specific decision the next time it comes up.
Leaders and founders do appear to read more than the general population, with some prominent examples reaching well beyond 40 books a year, often through heavy use of audiobooks counted alongside traditional reading. But the studies producing the highest numbers tend to sample high-profile CEOs or self-selecting survey respondents who already value reading heavily, which inflates the reported average relative to leaders more broadly across the economy. The more interesting finding sits underneath the debunked statistic: multiple studies point to a consistent, if smaller, reading habit, something closer to a book or two a month, as a marker that correlates with strong leadership, rather than a specific high volume being the threshold that matters most.
books per year read by the average "avid reader" in the U.S. general population, a useful baseline against inflated CEO-reading claims. Fortune, reading and leadership research →
What the research suggests matters isn't raw volume, but consistency and selection. A leader reading one carefully chosen book a month, applying what's in it, gets more practical value than a leader who claims a much higher number but treats books as background noise. What seems to separate leaders who get value from reading from leaders who read primarily to signal that they read is whether a book changes a specific decision within a reasonably short window afterward, restructuring one decision-making process within a month, rather than agreeing with everything in the moment and changing nothing.
