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Let’s do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officer’s responsibility is to safeguard the organization’s finances, then what’s the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, it’s more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the “CEO” naming convention doesn’t give much insight as to what the role is or what it’s responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Who’s responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation state—it’s right there in its etymology. But, perhaps, the “CEO” nomenclature needs a bit more clarity. After over 200 in-depth CEO interviews at the Yale School of Management’s Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management since 2020, Jon Iwata has an interesting take on the matter.
According to Iwata, the former IBM senior vice president and chief brand officer and now lecturer at Yale, the job of the CEO involves the challenge of “refounding” the company. That is, the founder started the organization for a reason, be it a year or a century ago, with a thesis about the business and why it exists beyond the category. Simon Sinek refers to this as a company’s “why;” I like to think of it as the company’s conviction. It’s what they believe and are willing to stand for, even if it means losing business. I find conviction to be much more action-oriented because your organization can have a “why” but veer away from it in the face of inconvenience. However, you can’t be convicted if you aren’t willing to stand for it. Through this lens of refounding, the CEO’s job is to maintain the integrity of the founder’s intended conviction and align it to a holistic operating system within the organization. That operating system, of course, is culture.
Like any culture, the ideology of a company’s conviction informs the way the organization see’s the world and how it engages in it. Over time, as an organization grows and each incremental team member grows further and further away from the founder and their intentions. Consider a start-up with five employees. It’s likely that the sixth employee gets to spend a substantial amount of time with the founder and hear her preach the gospel of the organization’s conviction. The sixth-hundred employee, on the other hand, after the company’s 50th year of operation, not so much. Therefore, there must be a vehicle to evangelize the enduring convictions of the organization. That’s the responsibility of the CEO.
This isn’t merely a matter of proximity; it’s also a factor of context. Take the fictional start-up that grows into a multinational organization sixty years later. Over the course of those decades, the world around the organization changes substantially, which exerts force on how the organization behaves. Societal norms shift. Social expectations evolve. New technologies bloom. The result of these changes subsequently require change from the organization as well. For instance, there was once a time when child labor was considered acceptable, but society changed (thankfully), which necessitated a corresponding organizational change. While these adjustments happen outside the organization, it’s incumbent on its leadership to not merely blow in the wind of change but also stay anchored in its conviction, negotiating the tension between the present (today’s context) and the past (the founder’s intention).
The founder constructed the organization’s point of view of the world in a world that no longer exists. Therefore, as the world around the organization changes and evolves, so, too, must the organization. What does the organization believe and what does that mean today? It’s the CEO’s responsibility to not only regurgitate the convictions of the organization but also recontextualize them for a contemporary world. Like the United States of America was founded 250 years ago on a conviction and a set of policies articulated in the Constitution, these ideas had to be recontextualized for a modern day. Hence, why we have amendments. The same goes for organizations.
This is the job of the CEO, to reenvision the founding beliefs of the organization in a contemporary context and imbed this refounding conviction into the operating system of the organization—its culture. So, perhaps, a more apt title for the CEO would be the chief envisioning officer, the leader whose responsibility is to envision the founder’s intentions in today’s world and activate the company to behave accordingly. This isn’t merely a grammatical subversion, but an entire paradigm shift.
Hear more about the idea of “refounding” in our conversation with Jon Iwata on our latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast.
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Last year, various surveys, including reliable indicators, have highlighted a significant decline in reading habits over the past decades.
The most striking evidence is not simply that people read less, but that their capacity for deep reading is weakening. According to OECD data, the proportion of 15-year-olds who fail to reach minimum reading proficiency has now risen to nearly one in four across advanced economies, with sharp declines in tasks requiring inference, evaluation, and integration of information across texts.
In the United States, NAEP scores show that average reading performance among 13-year-olds has fallen to its lowest level in decades, reversing long-standing gains. Laboratory studies mirror these trends: experiments comparing print and screen reading consistently find that readers of digital texts score 10–30% lower on comprehension and recall, particularly for longer and conceptually demanding material.
Eye-tracking and cognitive load research further indicates that frequent digital readers engage in more skimming, less rereading, and shallower semantic processing. Crucially, these effects are not confined to weaker readers. Even highly educated adults now report shorter attention spans for long-form text and greater mental fatigue when reading complex arguments, suggesting that the decline of reading reflects not a loss of literacy, but an erosion of the cognitive endurance and attentional discipline that deep reading uniquely develops.
Not just children
To make matters worse, various robust data indicators show that adults are spending less time reading, especially for pleasure. For instance:
(1) A large time-use study analyzing diary data from over 236,000 Americans found that the share of adults who read for pleasure on an average day dropped from about 28% in 2003 to just 16% in 2023, a roughly 40% decline over two decades.
(2) That same research showed a steady annual fall of about 3% per year in the prevalence of daily leisure reading among U.S. adults.
(3) An earlier report by the World Economic Forum indicated average daily reading time in the U.S. declined from about 23 minutes per day in 2004 to around 16 minutes by 2019, even before the most recent decade’s drop.
(4) In the U.S., fewer adults now report reading books for pleasure: about 48.5% of adults said they read at least one book in the past year in 2022, down from 54.6% in 2012.
A real concern?
Should this really concern us? Perhaps not. After all, reading is just one medium through which humans have ingested information and exercised their minds, including for deep thinking. For most of history, knowledge travelled orally rather than silently on the page. Ancient cultures relied on storytelling, poetry, and song to preserve and transmit complex ideas: Homer’s epics were memorized and performed long before they were written down; Greek philosophy unfolded through dialogue rather than textbooks; and entire moral, legal, and scientific traditions were passed across generations through ritualized speech, music, and debate. From this perspective, the book is a relatively recent cognitive technology, not an eternal prerequisite for intelligence (consider that Socrates and his fellow philosophers were concerned by the invention of writing, thinking it may atrophy memory).
And today, once again, new media promise alternative routes to learning and thinking: immersive simulations, virtual and augmented reality, AI tutors, and even speculative neuro-technologies all claim to enhance understanding, creativity, or memory without requiring sustained reading at all. Perhaps these tools will indeed make us more knowledgeable or even smarter. Needless to say, not all reading is cognitively ennobling. Wading through a disposable airport romcom is unlikely to stretch the mind more than an unscripted, curious conversation with a stranger at a bar. The real question, then, is not whether reading is declining per se, but whether whatever replaces it can cultivate the same depth of attention, reflection, and intellectual effort that serious reading has historically demanded.
Digital diversions
To be sure, every person is different and even among those who are reading less, former reading time may be recycled or reutilized in many different ways. That said, there is a clear trend to devote more time and attention to the very technologies that have increasingly monopolized our focus over the past two decades. Time-use and media-consumption data strongly suggest that leisure reading has been displaced not by other cognitively demanding activities, but by screen-based media. In the United States, Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use surveys show that average daily reading for pleasure fell from about 23 minutes in the early 2000s to roughly 16 minutes by 2019, while time spent on digital devices and television increased steadily. Over the same period, social media use expanded rapidly: Pew Research Center reports that adult social media adoption rose from around 5% in 2005 to over 80%, with many users spending multiple hours per day on these platforms. Globally, Digital 2024 data indicate that adults now spend about 2.5 hours per day on social media and more than 6.5 hours per day consuming digital media overall, compared with a small and declining fraction of time devoted to reading books or long-form text.
While time spent reading traditional text has declined, many adults are substituting other sustained listening activities that share some cognitive benefits of reading; for example, Edison Research’s Infinite Dial reports that the share of Americans ages 12 and older who listen to podcasts weekly has grown from about 11% in 2013 to over 60% in 2024, with average weekly listening around seven hours, suggesting deeper engagement than typical short-form scrolling. Audiobook consumption has also risen sharply: the Audiobook Publishers Association and APA Foundation data show that nearly 50% of American adults listened to an audiobook in the past year, with frequent listeners averaging more than 6 hours per week, offering another way to engage with complex narrative and informational content. These trends indicate that although reading declines are real, listening to long-form spoken content (whether through podcasts or audiobooks) is increasingly filling part of the gap, providing extended attention to ideas, storytelling, and analysis in ways that resemble some of reading’s cognitive and reflective benefits.
Unique benefits
And yet, cognitive and developmental psychology remind us of the distinctive benefits of traditional reading, especially when it comes to thoughtful immersion and deep processing of text. Decades of research converge on at least five lessons worth remembering.
First, sustained reading strengthens attention and cognitive endurance, training the ability to concentrate for extended periods without external stimulation, a capacity that is closely linked to academic achievement and complex problem-solving.
Second, reading supports deeper comprehension and critical thinking: compared with fragmented or audiovisual media, linear text promotes inferential reasoning, abstraction, and the integration of ideas across time.
Third, regular reading expands vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, which in turn predicts reasoning ability (especially verbal and crystallized intelligence), learning speed, and even long-term occupational outcomes.
Fourth, reading fiction in particular has been shown to enhance perspective-taking and social cognition, improving people’s ability to understand others’ emotions, intentions, and mental states.
Finally, early and sustained exposure to reading plays a foundational role in brain development, literacy, and self-regulation, with long-lasting effects on educational attainment and cognitive resilience across the lifespan.
None of this means that reading is the only route to thinking, or that newer media are inherently inferior, but it does suggest that some cognitive benefits are unusually hard to replicate without sustained engagement with text.
And if you made it this far, thank you for reading this.
