Books That Changed How HEC Professors Think 

Transcript generated by an AI tool and lightly edited for clarity. 


Hello and welcome to the first edition of Breakthroughs in this new academic year. We ease our way into the fall of 2025 here at HEC with books that four of our researchers have picked as life changers. Pauline Asmar, Matteo Winkler, Lisa Baudot and Olivier Sibony. Share with us which Page Turner was a life changer for as the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle once said, “what we become depends on what we read”.  
 

After all of the professors have finished with us, the greatest university of all is a collection of books. Lisa Baudot, you are associate professor in the accounting departments here at HEC, where you've been since I think September, 2023. If my memory serves me right. What  books have inspired you for your academic career, which spans about 15 years so far.  
 

I would say the main book that has been an inspiration for me is a book called Man's Search for Meaning. And this is by Viktor Frankl. And was published initially in the late forties, early fifties. And Viktor Frankl draws from his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. So this is a book about finding purpose in life, even in very dark times.  
 

And he explains, or uses his experiences to show how people can endure really unimaginable suffering when they have a reason to keep going. So he explains that meaning comes from three main sources. Doing meaningful work, building relationships and choosing a positive attitude, even when facing pain that we have no control over.  
 

So through personal stories, he reminds us that life is always worth living if we can find purpose, no matter the circumstances. So it's really a kind of tragic, but also very inspiring and hopeful message about the strength of the human spirit in overcoming terrible obstacles and challenges.  
 

Now, of course you haven't yourself experienced such extreme obstacles, but this, for you personally, Lisa Baudot, has helped guide some of your decisions in the first the professional world and then the academic world. Is that right? I would say, when you think about what the book says about doing meaningful work, Frankl talks about how engaging in work that contributes to something greater than one's.  
 

Self can give you direction and give your life direction and significance. And I think that's something that regardless of what you're going through, we can all maybe relate to. And what I like about his writing is that doing meaningful work doesn't mean necessarily grand achievements. It can be as simple as dedicating oneself fully to a task or just using your skills to help others.  
 

And for Frankl, he used his experience as a psychotherapist to create purpose during these very. Dehumanizing times by trying to understand and let's say share insights about human survival and meaning. And so for me, and I think, the intent for readers is to try to approach their work always with some kind of intention and to view it as an opportunity to add value to our own lives and to add value to the world around us no matter what we're doing.  
 

Very well described, and I've asked you to choose an extract of this quite short book of about 200 pages in front of you, and if you don't mind reading it, what was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude towards life. We had to learn ourselves. And furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men that it didn't really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.  
 

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned daily by life. Daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets forth for each individual.  
 

And. Why did you choose this one? So I chose that because I liked the message here that while we can't always control what happens to us, we can control how we respond to it. And that, when we're faced with circumstances that are challenging, that we can find a way to hold onto, to purpose over despair.  
 

And that gives us a kind of sense of freedom and strength despite everything else that, that, that sort of might be going on around us. And so I like this message that it's really our mindset that shapes how we experience life, and by finding meaning and adversity we can maybe live with even greater resilience and purpose.  
 

Thank you so much. Today's book, man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a life-changing classic, born from unthinkable suffering, showing that even in the worst circumstances we can find, meaning, dignity. Purpose. Here's your one minute summary. Life has meaning under all conditions. Even in a concentration, camp Frankl discovered the power of inner freedom.  
 

You can't control what happens, but you can always control your response, and that's where your true power lies. Suffering ceases to be suffering. When it finds meaning ask not why me bud? What is life asking of me right now? Purpose is essential. People can endure almost anything if they have a why to live for choose.  
 

Your attitude between stimulus and response is a space, and in that space is your freedom and your growth. Meaning isn't something you wait for, it's something you make. So what's one way? You'll create more meaning today? Breakthroughs and knowledge at HEC Podcast. So I'm at Matteo, Winkler's office.  
 

He's professor in law, international law here. For how long has it been Matteo? 11 years now for 11 years and. I'm in front of your library with some very impressive books, probably spend a month reading some of them. There's one on hate speech, the harm of It, freedom for Thought that we Hate but there's also manuals on contract drafting and comparative law showing that you're a former lawyer for a dozen years.  
 

And a lot on diversity, but I've asked you to choose one which has particularly marked you in your academic career, and you've brought very kindly, one called an apartment by Paul B. Preciado.. Can you tell me why you chose this one? Yeah. Title of the book is an apartment on Uranus by Paul B. Preciado. B stands for Beatriz.  
 

Paul Presdo is a transgender man and in this book. He talks about his experience with transition. It's an amazing book. I read it in Italian first, and then I bought the English version because I wanted to use it in my research so it's better to quote [00:07:00] the English versions. He wrote a lot also about.  
 

Porn and, many interesting subjects. So Paul B. Preciado. is talking about transgender transition, homosexuality, a lot of things. And in a chapter that I like to, I would like to quote, which is titled The Bullet. He says, homosexuality is a silent sniper who plants a bullet in children's hearts, in school playgrounds.  
 

It tames without caring if they are the kids of ups, agnostics or diehard Catholics. Its hand doesn't tremble. And I think it was very interesting because it says that once you have this bullet in your chest, you can do different things. The first is look straight in the wound, and in this way the bullet becomes the key to.  
 

Seeing the world in some ways or to bury it more deeply in the chest, in which case the bullet becomes your guardian angel always by your side. So the dream of any people who have been shot by this bullet of homosexuality is to run away to a land where children bearing bullets are welcome as much as children who don't.  
 

I think this is a very. Interesting insight about the world of the L-G-B-T-Q community, and I really think that everyone should read this book and also the other books of Paul bi, which might be less poetic and more militant. Militant, yes, exactly. But I think this is a great metaphor that can help our lives.  
 

Physical spaces are always full of narratives and histories. And Textuality Paul Preciado discussing an apartment on Uranus in 2021. So in a sense, they're also partly places of imagination, right? So sometimes, when some, when friends come to my house, or sometimes I, I tell them in my house, we can really live, if we were in Anos, right?  
 

Like in a in that sense that that's the. The way we can all of us redefine the space in which we live, or the conditions according to which we live in a certain space, or how we relate to that space, right? The first notion of non-binary didn't exist within the 19th century. We didn't have an epistemology of non-binary gender.  
 

We didn't even have the notion of gender. But what I think it was really fascinating is that those that had been considered. Sodomites and therefore were persecuted legally develop a language about themselves, created a language, which I think is quite fascinating. That is some of these of these notions that we now have almost forgotten.  
 

Were not. Totally invented or just invented by science and by medicine in order to normalize bodies. But some of them were also invented as tools of emancipation at the beginning of the 20th century, the last part of the 19th centuries.  
 

I've come to Northern Paris, the 18th district, to meet Olivier Si in his office here, surrounded by books. And he's the professor of strategy at HEC Paris Olivier. It's a pleasure to meet you here surrounded by your books as some of them. I recognize like a noise, which you. Co-wrote with Daniel Kain and Casper Stein, but many other books.  
 

And the theme of this program is which book has really had the greatest impact on your professional outlook and your approach to research? So without question, it's thinking fast and slow by. Dan Danielle Canman. It's a classic. Danny passed away a year ago and we had a long collaboration before he died, but before, of course, we started collaborating.  
 

I had read thinking Fast and Slow. It's, I won't be the first or the last one to say that. It's a monumental book. If you haven't read it, you should. If you have read it, you should reread it. I reread it at least once a year, and every time I discover new stuff that I. Had read, obviously, but that I didn't remember because it's a surprisingly dense book Danny wrote in a very dense style.  
 

There isn't a word in Danny prose that doesn't absolutely need to be there, and therefore there are literal gems of knowledge hidden. In every page. So it's a book that is well worth reading and rereading. For instance the last part of thinking Fast and slow is about happiness and happiness economics.  
 

And you know what, what Danny has contributed to that field, which is now thriving. One, it's actually not in that chapter, but never mind when Jim related to that I. Keep thinking about when things do not turn out the way I would want them to is I'm quitting from memory, but I hope it's about right.  
 

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. That's a pretty powerful insight. And it helps you move on. It does. And you are one of the rare people who quotes a book and an author and then can actually discuss it with him in exchange. Have, did you do that in your long years of collaboration at all?  
 

Oh, yes. Many times. One of the things that I take away from those conversations actually is, there is one chapter in Thinking Fast and Slow that summarizes a lot of research on. A lot of social psychology research, especially on priming, which has turned out not to replicate when the replication crisis which you will be familiar with arose.  
 

And Denny has clearly said that he. You would not include this chapter in the book if he had to write it again, because the research simply does not hold up to scrutiny. And as he said, belief in well supported scientific evidence is not optional. However, he would also tell me, and he said in other settings that he personally found it very hard to unie what he had believed, right?  
 

He would. Rationally, of course, admit of course he would. Unlike many people, rationally admit that when the evidence contradicts what he had believed, he should change his mind. And he was famous for his willingness, his eagerness to change his mind when given new facts. At the same time, he would tell me, that on, on a gut level.  
 

He found it difficult to unie what he had believed before. I think there's a very deep lesson here, which is that you should be very careful about your information diet. If you think that you can, use your critical judgment to sift the good stuff from the bad stuff. Yes, you can to some degree, but once you start being exposed.  
 

To nonsense and to lies and to or to not lies, misguided, false, without bad intentions information, it's actually quite difficult to unie what you believed. Let's be careful where we get our information. We are lucky today to have the Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist, Daniel Kahneman, whose book, thinking Fast and Seller was one of the best sellers of last year and a great manual for how to make better decisions.  
 

Your book makes use of a very useful analogy. In fact, the analogy is [00:15:00] built into the title Thinking Fast and Slow. System one. Is thinking fast. System two is thinking slow. What's the difference between the two systems and why is it important for business decision makers to understand the difference?  
 

 System one is essentially what comes up automatically in your memory. When I say two plus two something comes to your head. When I say your mother, an emotion comes. So all these things that are automatic. Yeah, that's what I call system one, and you have no control of it because it's automatic and involuntary system.  
 

Two, the slower thinking is distinguished, really not so much by the fact it's slow, although it's pretty slow, but by the fact that it's effortful and deliberate. So what you can do deliberately, you do in system two, and you can do, you can well control yourself, control your thoughts, perform complicated computations.  
 

Those things are activities of system two. So system one does most of the mental work. It happens automatically. We don't have to worry to where to put our next foot or what word should come next. Some of the work, and it's important work is done by system two when we slow down. Do decision makers sometimes think they're in system two when they're actually in system one?  
 

I think mostly. I think most of us feel that we have reasons for what we are doing, but in fact we do what we are doing very largely because of reason that we're not necessarily completely aware of. And then when we are asked, why do you do this? We have reasons, but the reasons are not necessarily the causes of our actions.  
 

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman talking to Inc. Magazine back in 2013, HEC. Paris welcomed the economist and psychologist on campus back in 2022 for him to receive an honorary doctorate. Sadly, as Olivier Siboni mentioned, he passed away two years later. We finished this month's Breakthroughs with a book chosen by our July guest, doctoral candidate, Pauline Asmar.  
 

Pauline turned to Brave New Worlds published in 1932. This dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley  
is set in a futuristic world state 500 years from now. Society revolves around efficiency and science where there is no place for emotions and individuality. This is how Huxley reflected on his work in 1962 in Berkeley, marking the 30th anniversary of its publication with thoughts that resonate into the 21st century.  
 

That if you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent. It's exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for. Fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion, an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them.  
 

It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this. That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques, which, will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably always will exist to get people actually to love their servitude.  
 

This is the, seems to me the ultimate in malevolent revolution, shall we say. And this is a problem, which has interested me for many years and about which I wrote, 30 years ago, a fable, the Brave New World, which is essentially the account of a society making use of all the devices at that time available and some of the devices, which I imagined to be possible.  
 

Making use of them in order to, first of all, to standardize the population to iron out. Inconvenient human dis differences to create so to say mass produced models of human beings arranged in some kind of a scientific costs system. And since then, I have con continued to be extremely interested in this problem.  
 

And I have noticed, with increasing dismay that a number of the predictions, which were purely fantastic when I made them 30 years ago have come true or seem in process of coming true that a number of techniques about which I talked seem to be here already, and that there seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of.  
 

Ultimate revolution is this method of control by which people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs, which by any decent standard they ought not to enjoy. This, the enjoyment of of servitude. A chilling echo of our modern world by Aldous Huxley and his speech 63 years ago. While HEC scholar Pauline Asma was unable to talk to us about her choice of book, but she sent us the following passage, which marked her  
 

a New Theory of Biology, was the title of the paper, which Mustaf a Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time frowning. Then picked up his pen and wrote across the title page. The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical, and so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous, and potentially subversive.  
 

He added not to be published. He underlined the words the author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine biological station of St. Helena may become necessary. A pity he thought as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work, but once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose you didn't know what the result might be.  
 

It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition The more unsettled minds among the higher casts make them lose their faith in happiness as the sovereign good. Take to believing instead that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere. That the purpose of life was not the maintenance of wellbeing, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge, which was the controller reflected quite possibly true, but not in the present circumstances.  
 

Admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words not to be published, drew a second line thicker and blacker than the first. Then he sighed. What fun it would be he thought if one didn't have to think about happiness,  
 

an extract from Brave New World, which many considered to be among the 100 best novels in English. Huxley wrote it in the French Pul Commune of an appropriate thought, as I hope many of you return from coastal regions where you enjoyed books and good company and equal doses. Four, in the words of American author Jack Canfield, there are essentially two things that will make you wise.  
 

The books you read and the people you meet well, until next month's breakthroughs and its people, it's goodbye from the HEC campus, just outside Paris, and thanks for listening.