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Organised like a book club and a peer-review writing circle, as a back-to-secondary-school experience, the activity often turns into a team-building exercise. No instructors are needed, participants taking turns set the pace.

This is considered a necessary training because many managers find themselves reading and writing less, given the time available, and many are not steep in these skills.

The reading or writing club for managers must have a twist to it to make it more interesting. One club we started pitched a speaker every other week to give a brief talk on a book or a specific topic, with a written summary handed out before the talk. This became boring quickly because the speaker or writer naturally chose topics of his or her expertise. The write-up itself got to be like another lengthy office memo or rambling show-off thesis, never before asked to be published. 

The twist was that challenging subjects would be picked - outside one's fields - and the summary was limited to one page. 

Soon, the club's attendance improved. We heard from even physicists on obscure poetry, sometimes from accountants on religion. The critique for the presentation and the one-page write-up came from the participants, and the presenter got an overwhelming training from the outpouring of feedback. We touched on corporate social responsibility, ethics, even global warming (positing a false hypothesis) back then and well before these topics became widely debated. The critics had a field day.

It was on the day that our big boss dropped in on the session we learnt that this activity was to be considered bona fide training. He asked that anyone going to give talks outside the company or drafting a full-length paper for publication make good use of the club's critiques and critics. 

The one-page summary got a wider attention. All reports and memos for the company were to be submitted initially as a one-page abstract. If found warranted, the full version would then be encouraged. Proposals, grants, even patent disclosures had to go through the similar one-page hurdle. It was much harder to write well and briefly as opposed to incoherently and long. 

We managers signed up to be back in grade school, learning reading and writing again. Would you consider it?