Is there a (work) benefit to reading fiction?

In an effort to look broadly at how blogging is affecting a wide range of business sectors, I have a variety of blogs in my RSS reader, most of which are outside of the PR industry. I’ve found the blogs of the Wall Street Journal particularly interesting when trying to get an overview of news in specific sectors. When reading the Juggle blog a few weeks ago, a post on getting kids to read caught my eye—specifically, the following quote:

[…] Meanwhile, some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University, points out that most jobs don’t require narrative reading. Children need to learn to read for information, he says, something they can practice while reading on the Internet.

I disagree with Professor Kamil’s assertion regarding reading fiction, as it seems to assume that the only benefit of reading is to glean information from written material. In my experience, those who read a lot (fiction or non-fiction) are far better writers than those who do not read; and in my opinion those who read at least some fiction tend to be more creative writers in general. Writing well is fundamental, as it is such an important component of communicating effectively. This goes for PR practitioners (obviously), and quite frankly anyone else who needs to communicate with staff, customers, business divisions—you get the idea.

To his point about reading for information: that goes to the core of reading comprehension, something that we were constantly tested on when I was in grade school. I don’t think that there’s a bright line between fiction and non-fiction in that area; you are either able to pull information out of a paragraph or book you’ve read or you aren’t.

As I was traveling at the time, writing a blog post on the subject slipped my mind. Then, I came across this piece from the New York Times that examines the reading habits of CEOs. There is an impressive amount of variety in their reading diets. For example Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, keeps a copy of Persian poet Omar Khayyam’s “Rubaiyat” open on a table in his 2,000 square foot library for daily review.

Does reading fiction and poetry—things that are “made up,”—generate creative thought, or are these CEOs, as creative thinkers, somehow drawn to fiction? I’m not sure that is a question that can be answered definitively, but I do feel that it challenges the notion that encouraging kids to read fiction is a “misplaced goal” simply because jobs do not require that type of reading.