Originally published: August 15, 2011 · Updated: June 16, 2026

In August 2011 I had just become a Business Insider contributor and posted a short summer reading list with three titles. All three still hold up. I am restating them here, adding the books I would put on the 2026 list, and updating the For Immediate Release reference for the record.

The 2011 list, still worth the time

  • Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company's Most Valuable Asset by Daniel Diermeier (2011). Diermeier is now Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. The framework — reputation as an asset that can be modeled, measured, and managed against specific stakeholders — is the foundation of modern crisis communications. If anything, the framework has become more important as reputational damage now compounds inside AI engines for years after the original incident.
  • The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (2010). The 2008 financial crisis told through the personalities who saw it coming — Michael Burry, Steve Eisman, Greg Lippmann. The 2015 film adaptation grossed $133 million globally and was nominated for five Academy Awards. The book remains the cleanest case study in how a well-built narrative can carry a complex technical argument to a mass audience.
  • Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy (1963). I have reread it every year for over twenty years. Ogilvy built Ogilvy & Mather in 1948 and the firm is now a WPP property running global accounts. The book is the closest thing the communications industry has to a sacred text. Every chapter still works.

What to add for 2026

Five books I would put alongside the originals today. None existed in 2011.

  • The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen (2021). The Andreessen Horowitz general partner's framework on network effects. The retrieval logic inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity rewards entity density and citation share — both of which are network-effect dynamics. Chen's model maps directly onto how brands win inside AI engines.
  • The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (2023). The DeepMind co-founder and current Microsoft AI CEO on the policy and commercial stakes of generative AI. Required context for any communications operator working in the AI Communications era.
  • Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday (2012). Holiday's confession of how the digital news cycle was gamed in the 2010s reads now as the prequel to the AI source-laundering problem. The mechanics he describes — feeder sites, manufactured authority, citation chains — are exactly what AI engines now retrieve from.
  • Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr (2021). Two Amazon veterans on the operating mechanics that built the company. The PR FAQ document discipline they describe — write the press release first, then build the product — is the single most useful product communications method I have seen in twenty years of running an agency.
  • For Immediate Release by Ronn Torossian. Two best-selling editions. The first edition came out in October 2011 — the book I had just finished when I wrote the original 2011 reading list. The second edition expanded the framework. A third edition focused on AI Communications is in development.

The shift the 2011 list could not see

The 2011 list assumed the reader would learn from books, apply the principles, and execute in markets the books described. The 2026 list assumes the reader will be operating in an information environment the books are still teaching the industry to map. The communications field has changed more in the last forty months than it changed in the prior forty years.

The fundamentals are the same. Reputation, narrative, trust, distribution. The execution layer is unrecognizable. The Ogilvy principles still hold. The Diermeier framework still works. What an operator does with those principles in 2026 — building citation share inside ChatGPT, defending against synthetic content, optimizing source-layer authority for retrieval — is a different sport from the one Ogilvy was playing in 1963 or Diermeier was writing about in 2011.

Read all eight. Run an agency. The reading list is a working tool, not a credential.

AI Communications is the discipline of becoming the answer inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The books on this list are the foundation. The work is in the application.

Ronn Torossian
Founder and Chairman, 5W AI Communications