Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, says he spends roughly three hours a day reading and gets through one or two books a week. He has just revealed seven titles he particularly enjoyed this summer, and the mix says a lot about how the man running one of the world's biggest airlines thinks.
The list spans business, history, science and fiction. Topping it is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, a book about how exceptional service can transform an ordinary customer interaction — which Kirby called required reading for anyone in the service industry. If you've flown United lately and noticed the service push, this is the thinking behind it.
More telling for aviation watchers is The Impossible Factory by Josh Dean, about Clarence "Kelly" Johnson and Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works, the secretive unit behind the SR-71 Blackbird — Kirby's favourite aircraft. He wishes executives at Boeing, Airbus, GE Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce would all read it, a pointed comment at a time when engine shortages and delivery delays are hamstringing airlines worldwide. He pairs it with Freedom's Forge, Arthur Herman's account of America's wartime industrial mobilisation.
There's a science streak too: The Sleepless Ape by David R. Samson looks at how sleep evolved in humans as a social species — fitting for a CEO famously protective of his 8.5 hours a night. Then come the fiction picks, where Kirby's heart clearly lies. He recommends Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, ranks Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity as the best time-travel novel he's ever read, and champions Tolkien and the Great War, John Garth's study of how the First World War shaped Middle-earth. Asimov and Tolkien are, in that order, his two favourite authors.
The list isn't entirely new territory. Back in 2024, Kirby shared an earlier set of recommendations — The Three Body Problem, Thinking Fast and Slow, Why We Sleep among them — and United went so far as to install a "Scott's Shelf" in the Newark Terminal C United Club near gate C123, plus a library for staff at its Chicago headquarters. So if you're killing time in that lounge before a transatlantic flight, you can literally borrow the boss's taste in books.
Why should a traveller care? Partly because it's a rare window into what an airline CEO values — service, speed of execution, and rest — and those priorities do filter down into the product you board. Partly it's just a genuinely good reading list: hospitality theory, aerospace history, sleep science, Asimov and Tolkien make for a well-stocked holiday reading pile. Frequent flyers with United Club access in Newark might even find a copy waiting for them.