What to Read, Watch, and Listen To | Summer 2026 Edition
July 13, 2026
Summer reading lists are everywhere. Ours comes with a board agenda. Farient’s “Read, Watch, and Listen” feature returns in this summertime issue of our newsletter with books, TV series, and podcasts that make beach chairs, long flights, or languid days a little more strategic—covering AI, succession, incentives, innovation, and the future of work.
What to Read
Karen Hao’s bestselling Empire of AI is anything but another AI hype book. Hao uses the 2023 OpenAI saga as a lens to explore governance, power, incentives, and control in the race to dominate artificial intelligence.
The boardroom implications—especially around oversight, ethics, and concentration of power—are substantial. It started when OpenAI’s board unexpectedly fired CEO Sam Altman, saying it had lost confidence in his ability to be candid with directors. The decision shocked employees, investors, customers, and even Microsoft’s leadership, despite Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI. Within days, most employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. The board reversed course; Altman returned as OpenAI CEO; and several directors who supported the decision left the board.
Why directors should read it: The OpenAI board saga may prove to be one of the most consequential governance case studies of the decade. The situation combines nearly every governance topic boards confront today: founder power, board independence, mission versus profits, stakeholder capitalism, succession planning, AI governance, investor influence, and crisis management.
In The Technological Republic, Palantir’s famously contrarian CEO, Alexander Karp (with coauthor Nicholas Zamiska) argues that Silicon Valley, government, and national competitiveness have become dangerously disconnected. Whether readers agree or disagree, it’s a provocative examination of technology, leadership, geopolitics, and corporate responsibility. The authors argue that Silicon Valley should rebuild its relationship with government and redirect more talent toward defense, AI, and other public-interest challenges, rather than primarily consumer convenience products.
Why read? It raises uncomfortable questions about how boards think about innovation, national security, and long-term strategy. Consider: What responsibilities do technology companies have when their most powerful innovations carry national-security, geopolitical, or civic consequences—not just commercial upside? How should boards oversee innovation when “moving fast” may affect democracy, privacy, public trust, or the balance of power between companies and the state?
As boards grapple with generative AI, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity deserves a fresh look. The lively history lessons from authors Daron Acemoglu (Why Nations Fail) and Simon Johnson (co-author, 13 Bankers, White House Burning) won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024. The authors challenge the assumption that technological progress automatically produces broad-based prosperity; drawing on historical examples to show how technology’s gains depend on who controls it, how it is deployed, and whether institutions ensure that benefits are broadly shared.
Why read? Essential context for discussions about AI, workforce strategy, productivity, and stakeholder value.
Jan Eeckhout’s The Profit Paradox: How Thriving Firms Threaten the Future of Work examines one of the more uncomfortable contradictions of the modern economy: some of the world’s most successful companies are generating record profits, yet many workers face stagnant wages, higher prices, fewer competitive employers, and declining economic mobility. Eeckhout argues that the culprit is not technology itself, but the growing market power of “superstar” firms that use scale, data, acquisitions, network effects, and pricing power to widen their moats—and capture more of the gains from innovation.
Why read? For directors, the book offers thought-provoking context to spur conversations about competition, antitrust scrutiny, pricing strategy, workforce resilience, and sustainable business models. It also raises a timely governance question: when market leadership becomes market dominance, how should boards weigh shareholder returns against innovation, customer value, employee opportunity, and long-term economic legitimacy?
Hal Brands’s The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World offers a sweeping geopolitical frame for understanding why the struggle over Eurasia—its landmass, sea lanes, resources, populations, and military power—continues to shape global conflict. Brands argues that today’s tensions with China, Russia, and Iran are not isolated crises, but the latest chapter in a longer contest between authoritarian powers seeking strategic dominance and democracies trying to preserve balance.
Why read? For directors, the book is a useful reminder that geopolitics is no longer background noise. Supply chains, capital flows, energy security, market access, sanctions exposure, talent mobility, and regional growth strategies are increasingly shaped by great-power competition. Brands’s framework can help boards pressure-test assumptions about globalization, resilience, and where the next strategic shock may emerge.
PwC’s Megatrends report is not a book, but it may be the closest thing to an updated future-trends briefing for directors. PwC defines five global shifts—climate change, technological disruption, demographic shifts, a fracturing world, and social instability—as forces that are no longer distant or theoretical. The report’s central insight is that these trends are accelerating because they interact with and amplify one another, turning long-term forces into near-term operational and strategic pressures.
Why read? For boards, the report’s value is in its framing. The authors push directors to look beyond single-issue risk management and ask how climate pressure, demographic change, geopolitical fragmentation, social instability, and technology-driven disruption may influence the company’s business model. It is especially useful for strategy offsites, enterprise risk discussions, scenario planning, and conversations about whether the organization is adapting quickly enough.
What to Watch
Industry (HBO) remains one of the most insightful portrayals of ambition, incentives, culture, and decision-making in modern finance. Created by former investment bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the series begins with a cohort of young graduates competing for permanent seats at Pierpoint & Co., a fictional London investment bank, then widens into a broader study of power, loyalty, status, risk-taking, and institutional fragility across the financial sector. What makes the show compelling for a governance audience is not the trading jargon, but the human system underneath it: how pressure travels through a firm, how leaders reward performance, how informal culture can override formal controls, and how quickly smart people can rationalize bad behavior when pay, prestige, and survival are on the line.
Board takeaway: Compensation committees will see how pay design, promotion systems, client pressure, and “star performer” cultures influence behavior—sometimes in ways nobody intended. The series is a sharp reminder that incentives do not operate in a vacuum; they are amplified by leadership tone, peer norms, risk appetite, and whether the organization is willing to challenge revenue producers before misconduct becomes strategy.
The Playlist (Netflix) dramatizes the rise of Spotify through a clever six-episode structure, with each installment told from a different stakeholder’s point of view: the founder, the industry, the lawyer, the coder, the investor-partner, and the artist. The result is more than a start-up origin story. It captures the messy trade-offs behind disruption—how a brilliant product vision collides with entrenched business models, licensing negotiations, creator economics, technical execution, capital needs, and the pressure to scale before competitors or incumbents can catch up.
Board takeaway: A provocative study of founder power and the moment when innovation stops being a product story and becomes an ecosystem story.
At first glance, it’s a wine drama. In reality, Drops of God (Apple TV+) is a nuanced story about succession, legacy, expertise, and stewardship. After the death of world-renowned wine critic Alexandre Léger, his estranged daughter Camille learns that she can inherit his extraordinary wine collection only by competing against Issei Tomine, Léger’s gifted protégé and “spiritual son,” in a series of sensory tests. The premise may be highly stylized, but the underlying questions are familiar to any board: Who is truly qualified to inherit authority? How should organizations weigh formal ownership against lived expertise? And what happens when a founder’s legacy is powerful, unresolved, and emotionally loaded?
Board takeaway: Every succession decision involves both capability and culture. Drops of God makes that point elegantly: technical mastery matters, but so do trust, legitimacy, emotional intelligence, institutional memory, and the ability to carry a legacy forward without being trapped by it.
The Billion-Dollar Code (Netflix) is a four-part German miniseries based on the real dispute between Berlin-based ART+COM and Google over TerraVision, a pioneering 1990s digital globe that anticipated many of the features later associated with Google Earth. Told across two timelines—post-reunification Berlin’s experimental art-and-hacker scene and a later U.S. patent battle—the series is part innovation story, part courtroom drama, and part cautionary tale about how breakthrough ideas can be commercialized, copied, misunderstood, or lost when ownership, documentation, and negotiating leverage are weak.
Board takeaway: Without governance and ownership clarity, innovation can create conflict. The series reminds boards of the importance of understanding how intellectual property is protected, how partnerships are documented, who controls critical code or data, and whether the company’s most valuable ideas are backed by legal, commercial, and organizational discipline.
McMillions: The Absolutely True Story of How an Unlikely Pair of FBI Agents Brought Down the Most Supersized Fraud in Fast Food History is an entertaining six-part HBO Documentary that first aired in 2020. The story of a near-perfect fraud scheme is told from the perspectives of the investigators who pieced together that the scam’s mastermind was an ex-police officer employed as head of security for the marketing agency responsible for creating and running the popular game. It’s true crime at its finest. For those who prefer to read, the doc’s creators James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte wrote a book that provides greater untold details on how the fraud scheme from 1989 to 2001 bilked McDonald’s popular Monopoly prize game out of an estimated $24 million.
Board takeaway: Internal controls matter more than strategy.
What to Listen To
Boardroom Governance with Evan Epstein remains one of the best focused podcasts for directors. Epstein launched the podcast and companion newsletter during the pandemic in May 2020 and has since built an archive of more than 175 long-form interviews with leading voices in corporate governance. New episodes generally appear about every two weeks, though some podcast directories show a roughly nine- to 11-day cadence, and most episodes run close to an hour. The guests range from governance scholars and Delaware experts to activists, founders, investors, executives, and experienced board members, often addressing issues before governance conversations go mainstream.
Why listen? For directors, the value is both practical and current: Epstein’s interview format surfaces how thoughtful board leaders are thinking about independence, activism, founder control, private-company governance, AI oversight, Delaware law, crisis management, and boardroom dynamics in real time.
Acquired: Every Company Has a Story and its shorter-form sister podcast, ACQ2, are brilliantly produced by founders and hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. Their deep dives into companies such as Vanguard, Disney, Ferrari, and others are master classes in strategy, capital allocation, governance, culture, and why some organizations compound advantage while others fail. Episodes can run several hours and are built from extensive research, interviews, financial documents, and primary sources; there is no rigid publishing schedule because the reporting and production time varies.
Why listen? For directors, Acquired is a strategy lab in audio form: each episode offers a long-view case study in business model durability, founder influence, ownership structure, customer obsession, capital allocation, and the choices that turn competitive advantage into institutional advantage.
Each episode of Harvard Business School’s Cold Call distills a classic business case into a conversation with the faculty author. Hosted by Brian Kenny, the podcast generally airs every two weeks and turns HBS’s case method into accessible discussions about scaling, leadership, governance, innovation, family business, organizational change, and strategic decision-making.
Why listen? For directors, the appeal is practical: Cold Call compresses a boardroom-ready case discussion into roughly half an hour, making it useful for sharpening judgment, testing assumptions, and seeing how leaders navigate trade-offs under pressure.
Norges Bank Investment Management’s In Good Company, hosted by CEO Nicolai Tangen, turns the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund into an unusually transparent platform for conversations with global business leaders. New full episodes drop every Wednesday, followed by a short “Highlights” recap each Friday. Tangen interviews CEOs, founders, investors, and other senior leaders about strategy, leadership principles, capital allocation, sustainability, technology, and what it takes to build and run large, globally consequential companies.
Why listen? For directors, the show offers a rare investor-side view of leadership and stewardship. It is especially useful for hearing how major companies explain strategy, culture, risk, and long-term value creation to one of the world’s most influential shareholders.
Hard Fork, from The New York Times, is one of the few technology podcasts that manages to be both entertaining and intellectually serious. Launched in October 2022 and hosted by journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the weekly show explores “the future that’s already here,” with episodes that typically run about an hour. While the podcast began as a broader look at technology and business, it has become one of the most useful running conversations about AI, platform power, regulation, product launches, labor-market disruption, digital culture, and the increasingly blurry line between Silicon Valley strategy and public policy.
Why listen?For directors, Hard Fork is a fast, lively way to keep up with the questions that will soon migrate from the tech press to the board agenda and how quickly business models can be rewritten by emerging technologies.
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