What FAANG execs read this week — June 8–15, 2026

The week of June 8–15 produced the most concentrated EQ reading signal this digest has tracked — all from one source. Richard Hua, CEO of EPIQ Leadership Group and former Amazon executive, published four LinkedIn posts between June 9 and June 13, three of which carried explicit book and research citations. Ethan Evans, former Amazon VP, weighed in on June 12 with a single reading recommendation: Hua's own article on executive presence. That cross-endorsement — Evans calling Hua "one of the world's leading expert on emotional intelligence" and directing his 200K+ followers to Hua's work — is the first time two tracked executives have publicly pointed at the same content in this digest's five-cycle history.

Marvin Chow posted nothing relevant for a fourth consecutive week and has been removed from active monitoring. Jack Sallay's profile remains behind LinkedIn's login wall.

Richard Hua — CEO of EPIQ Leadership Group and formerly Worldwide Head of EPIC Leadership at Amazon, where he scaled EQ programs to hundreds of thousands of people — opened the week on June 9 with a post framing emotional intelligence as a learnable skill rather than a fixed trait. 1

His argument opened with a Stanford study finding that empathy is approximately 30% genetic and 70% developed — framing the data as evidence that EQ is trainable, not inherited. 1 He also drew on his own trajectory: "One of the biggest myths about emotional intelligence is that it's something you're born with. You either have it or you don't." Then, unusually directly, he listed three books as his foundational reading stack.

Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995, reprint Bantam Books 2005) is the book that put EQ on the map globally. Goleman, drawing on neuroscience and behavioral research, argues that emotional competencies — self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill — predict life outcomes more reliably than IQ. The book popularized a five-domain model that most subsequent EQ frameworks have either adopted or argued with. Hua's framing: "EQ is not a trait reserved for a lucky few. It's a skill. And like any skill, it can be developed." 1

Marc Brackett's Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want (Celadon Books, 2025, ISBN 978-1250329592) is Brackett's follow-up to his 2019 Permission to Feel. Brackett is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and lead developer of the RULER framework (Recognize, Understand, Label, Express, Regulate). Where Permission to Feel focused on the case for emotional literacy, Dealing with Feeling is structured around practical application — using emotions as data to improve decision-making, relationships, health, and performance. Brackett's core claim is that emotional skills are teachable and that emotionally literate environments benefit both children and adults.

Travis Bradberry's The New Emotional Intelligence (likely 2024–2025) updates the framework from Bradberry's earlier bestseller Emotional Intelligence 2.0 (2009, co-authored with Jean Greaves, TalentSmart). Bradberry — a LinkedIn Top Voice with 2.5 million followers and a dual PhD in Clinical and Industrial-Organizational Psychology — builds the new version on recent psychology and neuroscience findings. The structure tracks four core EQ skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. An independent synopsis of the new edition was not available in collected sources; the description above is reconstructed from Bradberry's publisher bio and the framework of the prior book.

The June 10 post shifted from individual skill-building to organizational design. 2

Hua cited research by Marc Brackett and Zorana Ivcevic Pringle (both of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence) identifying three conditions necessary for emotionally intelligent cultures to take hold. The specific paper was not named in Hua's post.

The framework identifies three interdependent conditions:

Hua's argument: most organizations invest heavily in Ability but leave Motivation and Opportunity largely undesigned. He connected this directly to Amazon's Leadership Principles (Customer Obsession, Working Backwards) as examples of how culture-shaping mechanisms work at scale — not through training alone, but through systems and incentives that reinforce the same behaviors daily.

He also made the AI transition argument explicit: "AI transformation is not primarily a technology challenge; it's a human one." 2 The organizations that fare best, in his framing, won't necessarily have the best models — they'll have people who learn faster, adapt better, and trust more.

On June 12, Hua published his third guest article on the Level Up Newsletter (co-run by Ethan Evans and Jason P. Yoong) on the topic of executive presence. 3 The LinkedIn post promoting the article cited one piece of research: Gloria Mark's attention span findings.

Mark, a professor at UC Irvine and author of Attention Span (2023), has documented the decline of sustained screen attention over two decades — from 2.5 minutes in 2004, to 75 seconds in 2012, to approximately 47 seconds by 2023–2024. 4 At 47 seconds, a one-hour meeting contains roughly 77 distinct attention switches. Hua used this as the factual underpinning for his definition of executive presence: not a quality you summon on demand in high-stakes moments, but a practice built through ordinary interactions.

His framing of executive presence across the article and post: "Executive presence is just presence deployed in high-stakes environments. If you can't be fully present with your team during your weekly meeting, you won't magically find it when you're presenting to the C-suite." 5 The four EQ skills he outlines for building it: Self-Awareness → Self-Management → Social Awareness → Relationship Management — a sequence traceable to Goleman's original model.

"Presence is not a performance. It's a practice." 3

Ethan Evans — former Amazon VP (15+ years), founder of Level Up Leadership (200K+ LinkedIn followers) — did not post an independent reading recommendation this week. His four other posts covered travel reflections from a European trip and promoted his June 27 Executive Presence webinar.

The exception was June 12. 6 Evans shared Hua's Level Up article under the heading "Perception is Reality," positioning executive presence as a managed perception exercise — and pointed directly at Hua's piece as the operational how-to: "You can start with Richard Hua's article for our Level Up newsletter. Rich is one of the world's leading expert on emotional intelligence (EQ)... Read the article here." 6

The endorsement is worth noting for what it is and isn't. This is the first time two executives tracked in this digest have directed their audiences toward the same content in the same week — a structural first in five issues. It is, however, a cross-promotion between two collaborators on a shared newsletter, not an independent convergence on a third-party text. Evans had no separate book or paper recommendation of his own this cycle. His reading cadence historically produces original recommendations every two to three weeks; the June 8–15 window appears to fall between those cycles.

Three weeks running, Hua's recommendations have circled the same territory from different angles: purpose as AI-resistant advantage (May 25–June 1), relational energy and grit as human multipliers (June 1–8), now EQ as a teachable architecture and presence as its most visible output. The Goleman–Brackett–Bradberry stack he listed this week is a structured reading path, not three unrelated picks — it moves from the canonical framing (Goleman) to the latest research-backed application (Brackett) to a practical skills program (Bradberry). Whether that's an intentional curriculum signal or just a week's worth of posts is an editorial inference, not a stated fact.

Evans' explicit endorsement brings social proof to Hua's framing for an audience that may not yet follow Hua directly. The executive presence article is paywalled on Substack; the free version covers the first two of four EQ skills outlined in the piece.