Hartford Funds is making a list of books and podcasts circulating internally at the company available to the public.
At the start of this summer, employees including Chief Compliance Officer Joe Melcher, began making book and podcast recommendations on the company’s intranet. But the informal book club took off and it became clear it could branch out to something bigger.
As a result, Hartford Funds started the “What We’re Reading” series.
Some of the recommendations might not surprise, as investment professionals seem to be looking for a mind hack to give them an edge or decompress. Brian Kraus, the head of the Investment Consulting Group, recommended Mindfulness in Plain English by Henepola Gunaratana “to anyone looking to establish or rejuvenate good meditation habits, which was written by a Sri Lankan monk.”
There are fiction and memoirs alongside business books such as Simon Sinek’s Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.
Melcher recommended The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan, a history of the Roman Republic in the years before Julius Caesar’s rise to power.
A spokesperson said the series shows the company’s human-centric approach to life and “pulls back the curtain on who we are as an organization.”