By MELISSA KORN

We asked a group of leading business thinkers what books make their must-read lists. Fiction, nonfiction, even drama made the cut, each offering an oft-surprising business lesson. Here are some of their top picks:

Warren Bennis, management professor, University of Southern California; Author of Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

Henry IV, Part 1, by William Shakespeare

“Falstaff was sent to help Hal become ‘kingly’ – [he was] the first executive coach of all time. Falstaff tell Prince Hal that if you want to lead people, you better understand their world. I read it at least every other year, and always learn something.”

HarperCollins

Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by Ron Suskind

“It’s about a rookie taking on what is probably the most significant, complex job in the world [U.S. President] – a leadership development story.”

***

Sally Blount, Dean, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama

“Fukuyama lays out a comprehensive, yet simple framework for understanding how humans join together for collective action and what they seek to achieve from the process of participating.”

***

Tom Davenport, Information technology and management professor, Babson College; author of Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

“William E. Dodd was appointed to the important post [of Ambassador] largely because there seemed to be no one else available. It’s not clear whether a more able hand could have done anything to stop Hitler, but the book illustrates the perils of settling for mediocre job candidates.”

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

“An early peek into the ethical and intellectual property issues we will face as we enter the world of genetic medicine. Lack’s cells have been used for a variety of medical and scientific purposes, though neither she nor her family received much benefit. Life sciences firms will have a much tougher time in the future with securing biological material for their own purposes.”

***

Ray Fisman, professor of social enterprise and co-director of the Social Enterprise Program, Columbia Business School

Used by Permission of the Estate of Arnold Lobel and HarperCollins Publishers

“Cookies,” from Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel

“Frog knows his weaknesses. He understands that he’s an impulsive little amphibian. The only way he can commit to not eat all of the cookies is to foreclose opportunities by feeding them to the birds. “Cookies” serves as a beautiful parable for recent work in behavioral economics on various mechanisms for tying one’s own hands in the face of temptation.”

Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, by Peter Moskos

“If someone in [from] The Wire decided to do a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard, this would be his thesis. It highlights the complicated business of designing incentives and structures for an organization that has an incredibly challenging objective.”

***

Glenn Hubbard, Dean, Columbia Business School, former chairman of U.S. Council of Economic Advisers

Penguin Press

The Judge: A Life of Thomas Mellon, Founder of a Fortune, by James Mellon

“The essence of entrepreneurship and seeing opportunity in uncertain times.”

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis

“While Kennan is not a businessperson, the book illustrates well how the mind of a deep strategic thinker evolves from a mix of formal training and real experience.”

***

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, business administration professor, Harvard Business School

Albert Watson

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

“Instead of clichés about leaders, Isaacson provides a nuanced portrait of Jobs as he wanted to be seen and Jobs as he appeared to others. His life was [is] part inspiration — showing that it’s possible to stretch, soar, and innovate with courage — and part cautionary tale about all the ways in which perfection is unattainable.”

***

Roger Martin, Dean, University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management; Author, of Fixing the Game: Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL

The Enlightened Eye: Qualitative Inquiry and the Enhancement of Educational Practice, by Elliot Eisner

“[The book] is Eisner’s defense of qualitative research techniques in the face of a world that favors quantitative techniques. It is brilliant because it demonstrates convincingly that for many research endeavors, qualitative techniques are in fact more rigorous than quantitative techniques. It is about the field of research into education, [but] it is utterly applicable to the world of business, which needs to swing the pendulum back from mindless quantitative crunching to qualitative appreciation.”

***

Jeffrey Pfeffer, organizational behavior professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business, author of Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis

“What is amazing is not just that people are greedy and prone to engage in ethically questionable activities; the big lesson is how people can reach unimaginable positions of power and essentially be (a) incompetent, and (b) not willing to do even the most mundane and trivial parts of their job.”

***

Viking

Robert Shiller, economics professor, Yale University; co-creator of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker

“It teaches lessons about human nature that would offer many insights for business. It is about human conflict, and how it is resolved.”

Write to Melissa Korn at Melissa.Korn@wsj.com

By HEIDI MITCHELL

Heidi Mitchell reports on a family falconry outing, plus five other places to learn spear-fishing, gladiator skills and other arcane sports. Photo: Gleneagles Hotel.

It began—as too many misadventures do—with a raffle. At my oldest son’s school fund-raiser we won a trip to Medieval Times. So off we went to New Jersey to be served by wenches, marvel at the jousting and root for the Spanish king to bequeath his daughter to a suitable swordsman. As with Nascar and Mexican wrestling, once we got into it, we loved it—from a safe distance.

Then the wing of a falcon nearly grazed my son’s brow, and the questions flew: How do you train a bird of prey to come home? Is it safe to hold one? Can we try it? Where?

The sport of falconry is thought to date to around the 2nd millennium B.C., when Mongol tribes used birds of prey as hunting guides. Holy Roman Emperor King Frederick II wrote the first primer on falconry, with his 13th-century field guide, “The Art of Hunting With Birds.” Even though Bobby Kennedy Jr. has oft been photographed hawking, the sport has only recently taken hold in America. After all, these days we have guns to shoot rabbits and turkeys.

But along with gladiator skills and spear fishing, falconry is one of the many throwback sports enjoying a revival as been-there-done-that travelers hunt for new experiences. So on our next trip to my husband’s homeland of Scotland, we booked a lesson at the British School of Falconry at the Gleneagles Hotel, whose 850 acres of Scottish highland is quite the setting for pretending to be a clan chief hunting for dinner.

“From tip to tip, the hawk’s wingspan was longer than my second-grade son was tall. ”

Steve and Emma Ford started the first school dedicated to hunting with birds in 1982, establishing it at Gleneagles a decade later. What began as an odd hobby has grown into a full-fledged business: the school trains 4,000 guests to hunt with hawks each year, and the Fords have opened a sister school at the Equinox, in Vermont.

Their Gleneagles menagerie is home to 46 trained birds, most of them Harris hawks, which originated in North America. Guests are given a tour, then outfitted in Barbour jackets and left-hand gloves. (In the old days, the right hand was your “knife hand,” and thus left uncovered.) And off they’re sent to a big, grassy knoll fringed by woodland, to hunt for a stuffed rabbit.

Mr. Ford’s colleague, Steve Burdett, introduced three generations of Mitchells to our bird (it didn’t meet us; its head was hooded), then placed the predator on a stand. He explained the training process, which takes around six weeks, and how the hawks can spot prey from more than 100 feet in the air. Once they see the animal, they dive and pin it to the ground, letting a human or gun-dog retrieve the carcass. Bits of fresh meat reward the birds when they return to their home perches.

Though we were all a little concerned about a sharp beak coming at us full throttle, Mr. Burdett assuaged our fears. “They don’t use their faces as weapons on their masters,” he assured, then gave a demonstration: He unhooded the hawk and set it on his begloved wrist. With some signaling and a graceful fist-pump, he launched the hawk high into the sky, where it hovered for a moment searching for its target, then dove to where the fake bunny was tucked into the wood.

Aloft again, the predator circled back, and at Mr. Burdett’s command, landed on my father-in-law’s hand, where a piece of meat from Mr. Burdett’s bag was waiting as a prize. Delighted laughter ensued. The hawk took off again, circled and landed on my husband’s wrist. Another circle, land on my wrist (my eyes remained tightly closed—those winged things are terrifying). Though I couldn’t feel the claws through the thick suede, the weight of the bird brought my forearm down 45 degrees—and my body to my knees.

Perhaps in poor judgment, when the bird came around again, we allowed our eldest son to outstretch his delicate arm in acceptance. From tip to tip, the hawk’s wingspan was longer than the second-grader was tall.

I held a squeal as the feathered predator made contact with my little rabbit. My son’s eyes, lit with awe, said everything I couldn’t. And then, he confidently fist-pumped the bird into the sky, and caught it once again.

This summer we’re hoping to go to Rome. There’s a program that teaches gladiator skills to adults and children of all ages. I think we’ll stay for a while and brush up on our sword fighting.

—From about $120 per person for a 45-minute lesson; gleneagles.com/activities

Go Gladiator in Rome

“Rome” may no longer air on HBO, but you can still get your gladiator fix. The Waldorf Astoria’s Rome Cavalieri hotel offers a training program where guests are fitted with tunics and wooden swords and taught basic moves for attacking and defending. Once they’re ready, the instructor draws a circle in the sand and breaks out real swords, shields and helmets. Kids are welcome. (Get travel insurance.) $600 for two hours of lessons for up to eight people; romecavalieri.com

Play Pato in Argentina

Pato, aka horseball, is a 17th-century sport that resembles a cross between polo and basketball—using a live duck. Bespoke travel planner Blue Parallel can book solid horseback riders on a day trip from Buenos Aires. At an estancia in the pampas, they learn to get the “duck” into the opposing team’s net. Happily, what was once a bird sewn into pigskin is now a ball with leather handles. $500 per person; blueparallel.com

Learn to Ax in New England

Channel your inner woodsman at the Mountain View Grand resort in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where guests as young as 15 can learn to toss an ax at a bull’s-eye some 20 feet across a sand square. Make sure your mother-in-law isn’t behind you—the heavy chopper can easily fly out of your hands. Rooms from $159 per night, ax-throwing included; mountainviewgrand.com

Sterling Kaya

Learn to hunt fish with stone-tipped spikes.

Stick Fish in Polynesia

Between visits to a lake filled with stinger-free jellyfish and an ancient “bank” stocked with stone currency, guests on Off the Beaten Path’s trips to the Micronesian islands of Yap and Pulau can hunt fish with stone-tipped spikes just as the islanders did (and do). The activity is led by locals who teach aim and timing, then cook your catch. From $5,000 for an all-inclusive week-long trip for two; offthebeatenpath.com

Brave the Jungle in Brazil

OK, surviving isn’t actually a sport. But on Dehouche’s test-your-mettle trip, adventurers are joined on their riverboat by a former British marine officer who will teach them how to make shelter, find water, prepare food safely and navigate back to civilization. The five-night trip includes camping on the shore and in the rain forest, and can range from easy (cooking piranha stew) to extreme (eating bugs). From $5,000 per person; dehouche.com

Corrections & Amplifications

The British School of Falconry in Scotland trains mostly Harris hawks, which originated in North America. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the birds are from Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

By KAREN WILKIN

Williamstown, Mass.

What more unlikely combination than the most genial of the Impressionists, a pair of hip German photographers, an African superstar sculptor, and the Berkshire hills? Yet the current offerings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, amid the rolling landscape here, include works by Camille Pissarro, photographs by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth, and “tapestries” by El Anatsui. Don’t assume a sympathetic connection between Impressionism and the rural setting; “Pissarro’s People,” organized by Richard R. Brettell for the Clark and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, concentrates not on landscapes but on Pissarro’s less-known images of family and friends, rural laborers, servants, crowds at street markets, and occasionally his own features. Since subject matter seems to have dictated choice, the result is the proverbial mixed bag, albeit an engaging and informative one, with rewarding high points that offset any lesser inclusions.

The exhibition aims at presenting an unfamiliar side of Pissarro and also investigating his social philosophy and politics, as revealed by his images of people. Much is made of Pissarro’s “outsider” status among his fellow Impressionists, as a Sephardic Jew born in 1830 to French parents on a Danish island in the Caribbean; (he died in Paris in 1903). Much is made, too, of his lifelong embrace of anarchism, and his friendships with radical political writers and theorists. We are encouraged to keep social theory in mind and think about images of domestic servants and rural workers in terms of the dignity of labor, the necessity of rest, and Pissarro’s hope that one day everyone’s time would be divided between productive work and restorative leisure. Views of bustling markets are not demonstrations of incipient capitalism, we learn, but rather of healthy exchange; Pissarro, we are reminded, sold his work, providing everything from commissioned paintings to multiple prints, at different prices, for different buyers.

It’s all thought-provoking and undoubtedly true—a series of tough-minded drawings, titled “Turpitudes Sociales” (social disgraces), were made as political instruction for two of his nieces—but the best works claim our attention for their aesthetic merit, not their political subtexts. Among them are affectionately observed images of Pissarro’s wife and his children at various ages, including a touching group of a favorite daughter, whom he drew and painted repeatedly, ending with a wrenching lithograph of her on her death bed, age 11. Generally, the works on paper are more relaxed and more powerful than the paintings. A splendid pastel drawing of a peasant woman lying in the grass, c. 1880, has more vitality and visual weight than an 1882 canvas of the same subject. A group of rural markets, painted on paper, and related lithographs, made in the 1880s and ’90s, are notably vigorous, with their all-over expanses of densely packed figures.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

‘The Marketplace’ (1882) by Camille Pissarro

Many works bear witness to Pissarro’s close connections with his peers—there’s a superb lithograph of Paul Cézanne in a strange hat—and with younger painters, such as Paul Gauguin, and Georges Seurat, for whom he seems to have been colleague, mentor and student, in what was usually a fruitful exchange, with the possible exception of some stiff, pointillist-inflected works whose red-blue-yellow palette makes you wish Pissarro hadn’t paid attention to Seurat’s advice.

The most potent works in the show are the self-portraits, early and late, recording Pissarro’s dispassionate scrutiny of his distinctive features, half hidden by his long patriarchal beard. In the last, painted the year of his death with dense, urgent stabs of pigment, he gazes steadily from behind glasses, white beard set off by a black coat and soft black hat. Behind him, a glimpse of Paris through a window. This fierce little painting is almost alone worth the trip to Williamstown.

Which is not to disparage the Clark’s other summer exhibitions, organized by the museum itself. “Spaces: Photographs by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth” presents two very different, austerely composed inquiries into the nature of public space and what we do there. Ms. Höfer’s often elaborately decorated interiors—here libraries and research centers—are eerily unpopulated; we are made to focus on the geometry of the room and the particulars of its furnishings, so that the images become meditations on time, as much as on the character of place. Excerpts from Mr. Struth’s series showing people in museums have special resonance, installed in close proximity to the Clark’s permanent collection. We have passed through corridors hung with Gericaults and Corots en route to Mr. Struth’s series about visitors in front of Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” in the Prado. We view images of the viewers of a work of art (images that are themselves works of art), replicating, at several removes, the action that captured Mr. Struth’s attention in the first place. As we ponder these layers of reality we realize that in at least one of Mr. Struth’s crowds, no one looks at Velázquez’s masterwork.

Up the hill, three of the Ghanaian-born, Nigerian-based El Anatsui’s metal tapestries enhance the galleries of the Clark’s Stone Hill Center, designed by Tadao Ando. Laboriously linked together from the metal bands on liquor bottles, the supple, richly colored sheets evoke the brilliant patterns of traditional kente cloth, with a nod at colonialism, waste, recycling and other highly charged issues. Draped elegantly against the walls of Mr. Ando’s well-proportioned galleries, El Anatsui’s tapestries look beautiful. Period. We can read about the politics later.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.