I think there are maybe 5 business books out there. I’m not sure how exactly I’d define the 5 different business books, but I think of you read 10-15 business books you’ve pretty much read them all. After a while, they all start boiling down to the same few points with differences in narrative content. If I were to take an unconsidered stab at a few of them: hard work + luck is about the closest formula anyone has found for success if applied over long time periods; you have to be disagreeable and believe in yourself, but not so disagreeable that you can’t get along with anyone; people are important, and treating them well leads to better businesses (over long time periods); sometimes you get dealt a bad hand.
Don't forget the tried-and-true "Don't sell to your customers; listen for their actual needs" advice that's repeated ad nauseum in a thousand different ways by B2B experts who claim to have "cracked the code" to increasing sales.
It's repeated because so few people actually talk to customers and meaningfully listen to them… But you're right, it has become overused.
An interesting counterpoint to "listen to your customers" is The Innovator's Dilemma, which details how increasing profit and producing a better product for your customers can sometimes make a company vulnerable to disruption.
I would also add taking steps to "increase luck surface area". One can't control luck and luck is, unfortunately, essential, but one can increase the opportunities for luck to play its part.
one corollary is that "proximity is power". being around people who are successful increases the chances that you will be successful. easier said than done, however.
Where does the point of being disagreeable come from and what purpose does it serve in the business world, in your opinion or according to these books?
You need at least one or two somewhat disagreeable folks in a team. Because without this, groupthink emerges, teams have too much inertia, they follow the assumed norm instead of challenging it for something better, they don’t debate the options enough. That disagreeable energy, in the right dose, leads to better decisions. If you don’t have it naturally, you can encourage someone to “play devil’s advocate” in decision discussions (or do it yourself) and you’ll find sometimes the devil’s advocate is actually right.
While there is certainly a lot of crap out there for business books, especially on sales/marketing and management, there are some core books that are must reads if you want to save 30 years of trial and error.
1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners)
2. Competitive Strategy
3. Discipline of Market Leaders
4. Good to Great
5. Built to Last
Good to great and built to last are just classic survivorship bias in book form. They are interesting as history books but not as actual analysis. They are fun reads but not to be taken seriously
I disagree on "Good to Great" and "Built to Last". In hindsight, they're classic extrapolations of survivorship-bias in a specific era of business instead of durable business practices. It should be more accurately titled as "Built to Fail" considering how those profiled companies have faltered or floundered.
I highly recommend Buffett's letters to shareholders https://a.co/d/cc1ufM4 and Goldratt's "The Goal" https://a.co/d/iJjTf1y and Taleb's "Antifragile" https://a.co/d/4bjC74J . Aside from his mathematical treatment's of uncertainty (which are free), I wouldn't recommend any of Teleb's other books.
"Let My People Go Surfing" https://a.co/d/2hq7ngp doesn't work for all business, but I really found it personally inspirational.
Oooooh! I forgot about Atomic Habits. It's not only one of the best "business books" I've ever read. It's the single best "self-help" book I've ever read.
I disagree on "Seven Habits" as its model of "effectiveness" is only applicable to (for lack of a better term) extroverted vocations.
If you like anti-fragile, I really recommend Fooled by Randomness and Black Swan. The Black Swan is a good example of a book with a good original idea that gets repeated so often its almost conventional wisdom, except that half the people saying it are misusing the term because they didn’t read the book.
I've read both of them and also the Bed of Procrustes. Though they're useful, I just feel the others are very classic "paper non-usefully expanded to book form" business titles whereas Antifragile's topic is benefited by the full treatise treatment.
It may be a waste of time if you had lived long enough to experience vividly the ins and outs of the business world. Taking an extreme example, senior execs who had "climbed from the bottom" in international companies. These people have seen/lived a lot, so no business book can really impress them or show something they haven't already seen. On the flip side, there is a high number of young people eager to learn how things work in the business world, but they don't want to experience everything, every failure, the ups and downs, they want to cut corners. I think for that kind of people business books can add some value, especially the biographical ones. It doesn't need to be the biography of a CEO (e.g. Jobs'). The life story of a great salesperson can change your mindset forever.
Yep. From the perspective of someone earlier in their career without all the "lived experience": Business books have helped me feel closer with (and better emphasize with) senior execs. I'm not necessarily trying to cut corners, but it helps in situations where I am expected to be a peer to folks who have been working much longer than I have.
Business books are definitely not a perfect substitute for lived experience or having a mentor, but they have certainly helped me.
You could probably put books like Team Topologies, Accelerate, and The Phoenix Project in the same boat with this list of business entertainment set of books and arguably the DevOps Handbook too
Familiar more with the first two and going to suggest there is a distinction between those and the phenomenon originally described in the thread (having read some others too)
Reven that being said, there could be value in those ‘repeat’ books inasmuch as one framing/telling may resonate with some more than others and get the message through, even if same message through multiple books.
Feels like it's the act of meditating on making things better, brought about by reading some unscientific and generally unimportant "framework" that matters more than the framework itself. Business books just force certain people to keep business improvement higher on their awareness. People who can keep that meditation high on their list without the books don't need the books.
There are plenty of great business books out there that aren't pop business books. For every critique listed there's a corresponding book that covers the topic.
I hope people don't expect to get an MBA's worth of content from a single book. Business is a subject that can be taught in schools or learned through self-study - either requires time and dedication. Whichever method you choose, you'll still need real-world experience to master it.
I am always amazed how most business book authors take a simple idea that could be described in one page, and turn it into a 200+ page book with popularizing narrative. What's more amazing is that the ideas are usually commonsense, but due to human nature are seldom practiced.
Sure, but at some point you miss something. You could summarize “The Lord of the Rings” as “Frodo journeys with much effort to destroy the One Ring at Mt. Doom, but in the end claims it himself and Gollum accidentally destroys it for him.” But the book is far more than plot.
“The Iliad” is basically “Achilles gets insulted and sits out the battle, while everyone else tries to win everlasting glory through bravery until Achilles finally has had enough and kills Hector.” But nobody is going to be reading that summary for 2500 years.
I'm not much of a book reader. Someone told me that if they follow the style guide you only have to read the first sentence of each chapter. It was kinda mind blowing to read a bunch of example books he gave me. The funniest part was returning to a previous book to read more of one of the chapters. I apparently didn't know how [those] books work.
There is an old chestnut in scientific publishing: "Say what you are going to say, say it, say what you have said."
This extends beyond the paragraph. You can get very far by reading the table of contents, the introduction and the conclusion of a scientific book. Dive in only if you need details or quotes ;)
Not exclusive to scientific publishing, either. Minto’s Pyramid Principle is a classic in strategy consulting and includes this structure. Have slso heard it called “triple coat”.
1. You need enough paper to create an object with a noticeable mass that takes time to work all the way through. Too small or short and it doesn't feel worth it. Make it short enough and people could read it in the book store.
2. People are bad at applying a crystalized abstraction in day-to-day life. They are better at learning narratives and fitting the current situation to the closest learned narrative, and then acting out the part of the protagonist. Instead of explaining a statistic or explicit rule of thumb, it would be more effective to give a bunch of examples where someone successfully applies the rule and is rewarded. Those examples can take up many pages.
People felt 5-10 minutes isn't enough time for something as serious as insurance.. but 25-30 is so long it turns people away... And then 5%, maybe even 10% savings isn't enough to go through the effort, but 25% seems unrealistic....
You need a document long enough to seem informative and authoritative without being too extreme in any way... Then you can slap a price on it and call it a book!
Many non-fiction books, you can get the gist by reading a blogger's summary, but I think the length of the book actually gives my brain time to digest and commit to permanent memory the idea(s) in the book.
Reading a 3 minute summary, once, I will easily forget the knowledge. But reading about the idea with different stories and other auxiliary information help me retain the principles much faster.
Its not only the idea, but the history, and analysis of the author.
Reading a book is not just “downloading a knowledge into your brain”.
Reading is more like executing a program and seeing dofferent result in dofferent people. People will reflect in a different way and come out with different takes, emphasize points, lessons, and takeaways
I feel the exact opposite. Slogging through all irrelevant filler in those books dilutes everything, and makes me impatient and unfocused, just fast-forwarding through.
Crossing the Chasm can basically be summarized in a page or two. There's probably some value in actually reading the book if it's relevant to your space.
i have an amazing idea, lets take the top 1000 business books, condense their ideas down to 1 page each and remove all the fluff and sell this as a 1000 page book
Amazon tried to disrupt this with their Kindle Singles program with books in the 75-100 page range. It is still technically around but consumers clearly voted against it.
Despite constant complaints about the padding in many non-fiction books (not just business) there's clearly a silent majority who feel like "If I'm going to bother, ugh, opening a book then I want it to be as thick as possible".
For that matter, you see a similar dynamic on the fiction side too with novellas and short stories bring far distant in popularity to novels. (Even though those same people have zero issues watching 22 minute TV episodes.)
There are some very nice short print books suchas OUP's "Very short introduction to...". Penguin (?) used to do single short stories and extracts of biographies etc. many years ago. I do not think they do any more, but I have some.
Then there was the delightful Bluffer's Guides series.
I like shorter novels and short stories myself, especially in SF where ideas matter.
It's the way the publishing industry works. There may be an article or possibly two or three articles with case studies, etc. but a published book needs to be 250 pages or so.
I really felt like I was fluffing up a book when I went through a publisher. For the second edition I felt it was a bit better as I trimmed some stuff and added a dedicated chapter with a legal co-worker. But it's downside to working through a publisher. Probably won't do it again and have self-published other shorter works.
I actually think that's one of the better ones - not in terms of business, but personal/family organization. Have you read it? Spoilers: it's not a list of 7 tricks to put in your daily schedule.
ugh it was mandatory read at a place I did my internship looooong time ago :) read the 8th habit out of curiosity what can that be that deserves an entire book by itself
The writer's children actually inherited his empire and even wrote a book called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. I always wondered—if the original book was so powerful and effective, wouldn't the greatest beneficiaries be his own kids? With their father's guidance and the principles from the book, they should have achieved remarkable success. After all, you can't find a better coach than that, and it's hard to beat such a winning combination. Yet, the result is that his child ended up making a living by writing a book telling others how to succeed—rather than demonstrating that success firsthand.
> He later earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. Covey was the starting quarterback on BYU's football team during the 1987 and 1988 seasons, where he led his team to two bowl games
> Covey worked at Deloitte and Touche consulting in Boston, followed by Trammel Crow Ventures in Dallas.
Stephen junior:
> He received an MBA from Harvard Business School
> He is the father of NFL wide receiver and return specialist Britain Covey.
7 Habits is a self-help/business-focused reconstruction of Covey’s more theologically-founded book Spiritual Roots of Human Relations. If you want Covey’s foundational thoughts on the subjects in 7 Habits, that will be the more informative read.
I agree they are common-sense, even the author said so, but the problem is that people don't come up with the habits until after they need them. If you know the habits and put them into practice early on, they make a difference. But like anything, they only work if they are put into use. I suspect that the best way to use them is to write them on a card and review them often - no book needed.
Sometimes that is true, yes. It’s also true that programmers/engineers often don’t do nuance outside their field. A extremely bright classmate who was an engineer swore it was a waste of time to read anything other than the headlines in newspapers. The actual article was unnecessary repetitive fluff.
What is seen as window dressing, is often essential tapestry that provides context.
That's the rule for writing books. I don't know about now, but it used to be that "Learn to" computer books were 1000+ pages. A group of programmers would get together and write mostly useless chapters each and put them all into one book. The book became a best seller simply because buyers thought they were getting a bargain.
It's the same for business books. A 30-page book won't sell, but a 250 one is a best seller.
This is my issue as well, not just with business books, but self-help in general. Many have a premise that might be helpful or at least interesting. But almost none of them require more than a blog post to fully explore. The expansion to a full book length is almost never worth it and is solely for the author to monetize the idea.
The entire broad genre of self-help + business has a reputation for being scam-adjacent for a reason. It’s pretty much all junk. Even the ones people say are “good” (people keep writing them because they can sell, which means some become popular, which are the “good” ones, but usually they aren’t good)
Some of them do have a page worth of valuable content; some have a page worth of misleading content that is worse than nothing; and most don't have any content.
The first set is supposed to be the "good" ones, but a lot of people will add books from the second set there too.
You need time/repetition for new information to sync in. The time needed is inversely proportional to how familiar you are with the subject. For example, I just said what I wanted to say, but now I'll repeat it in another way, because that will make it more accessible: if I already know imperative programming and some logic (?), my absorption of a new related subject - logic programming will be faster; if the most related thing I know is setting the alarm clock on my bedside, the absorption rate will be low and I'll need a lot of learning material for it to sink in.
I'm more empathetic to the "stretch out the simple idea" approach since I realized that there's basically no way to monetize or productize a concise but useful idea. If I read a really great tweet about doing creative work, I'd probably forget it in a day or two. But if I have a friend who's struggling with creative work, I can just give him a copy of The War of Art and there's a much higher chance it will "catch" (and Pressfield pockets a few well-earned dollars too). And for what it's worth, The War of Art does very little stretching.
My understanding is that printing 300 page paperback costs like $2 while 50 pages cost $1.50. However you can clearly claim way more money for the 300 pages so publishers are not interested in short books, business or otherwise.
Doesn't that describe most good ideas in life? Things that are commonsense (especially after the fact), simple, seldomly well practiced because of human nature, and can be communicated in a few paragraphs but take years to understand?
Kindness, democracy, business, performance in sport, scientific method etc.
I don't know one good idea that can't be communicated in a page or less.
“It works” is a rare example where the author deliberately kept the book short. I don’t recall how many pages it is but you can read whole thing in only 10 min or so.
While I agree that many of these books are inflated from 5 pages to 250 on purpose so that they can sell a book, it is sometimes useful to hear an idea multiple times, with examples and explanations as to why that idea is important. I’m not sure all those details can be included in a 5 paragraph ChatGPT summary.
I find it extremely annoying in books, but I don’t mind it at all with audiobooks, it drives the point home and makes you think about the idea and how you could apply it in your own life while you are going for a walk or doing the dishes.
Its because lots of non-fiction books start as articles, talks, essays, papers or blogs. Ideas that could be expressed in twenty pages or an hour talk get elaborated into books because books are the medium that sells. In the old days people wrote and sold pamphlets!
Length is 100% marketing. There is no commercial market for 15-20 page essays, which would be the ideal length for a lot of business books. (The famous Harvard Business Review cases are typically this long.)
The reason many business books feel fluffy is that these 15-20 pages of solid content are spread over 300 pages to meet the expectations of readers and booksellers.
You forgot the first 2 chapters whose purpose is to lay out with anecdotes how everybody does it wrong because they don't follow that one insight and argue that anyone who criticizes the book has the wrong mindset for being a successful entrepreneur.
The same formula seems to be common to all the "popular X" genres (science, psychology, etc), and has been for years. The Selfish Gene followed it. So do Malcolm Gladwell's books - the last one of his I read, I had to restrain myself from throwing at the nearest wall in frustration at his nonsense.
Would you believe me and would you immediately start following the advice if I told you that the key to a healthy life is "Surround yourself with meaningful relationships, sleep well, eat well, exercise, don't drink alcohol, and don't smoke"?
I don't know you but there's a good chance that you're not doing all of those things. There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice. There's a small chance that simply hearing those condensed words will change your behavior.
To change how we think and act we need good stories. This is what books are, including these business books. Good stories that take a simple idea and wrap it in anecdotes, justification, shock value, and entertainment so that they stick in your head and perhaps convince you to act in a certain way, at least sometimes.
Stories sure ... and I need to know how to do each of those things! Where "I" is a million people with different knowledge and backgrounds and health conditions and ages converging to the book.
> Would you believe me and would you immediately start following the advice if I told you that the key to a healthy life is "Surround yourself with meaningful relationships, sleep well, eat well, exercise, don't drink alcohol, and don't smoke"?
> There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice.
I just want to note that I do not agree with the above advice. Tobacco and alcohol in moderation are key parts of a healthy life. Abstention is neurotic and thus unhealthy.
A pack of cigarettes a year isn’t going to have any appreciable harm. A cigar a month isn’t going to have any appreciable harm. A pipe every few days isn’t going to have any appreciable harm.
But all of those will improve the quality of one’s life, and thus improve one mental health.
Your opinion that tobacco and alcohol in moderation are key parts of a healthy life is in the minority.
There was some evidence that pointed to some benefits to occasional minimal alcohol consumption, but in more recent years, the scientific opinion is that there are no safe amounts of alcohol consumption.
Alcohol has a side benefit that it generally encourages socializing, and being among people DOES have big health benefits. However, if you can have meaningful relationships and socialize WITHOUT consuming alcohol, that is even better.
I'm willing to bet that me stating that did not convince you in the slightest. However, if you read a book or two, were presented with evidence, written in more elegant prose, there is a bigger chance that you might be willing to start believing it.
Just stating things does very little, and that is why books are valuable.
> the scientific opinion is that there are no safe amounts of alcohol consumption
That is incorrect. For it to be true, a single drink in one’s life would be an unsafe amount — and that is clearly nonsense.
Alcohol and tobacco have positive and negative mental, physical and spiritual effects. Abused, they are terrible. Employed properly, they are key factors in a balanced, pleasant, meaningful and rewarding life — a healthy life.
I do acknowledge that the balance may be much less than folks commonly use. I hope that weekly use of alcohol and tobacco is safe enough, but fear that daily use may not be. I will not accept that yearly use is negative.
It's easy to summarize business books, even ChatGPT can probably summarize all the major ones just from its internal knowledge, but you'll likely not internalize any of the knowledge if you don't read the whole thing. The narrative might not matter that much by itself, but they'll make you remember the main points of a book.
I tried Blinkist (audio book summary service), but after listening to 20 summaries, I think I would have learnt more by just reading 1 book in full.
The funniest example of that is the book "Essentialism", which is about the idea that you should distill things down to what is essential and do only that, which he states on page 1 and 2 and then fails spectacularly to do by repeating himself for another 150 or so entirely redundant pages.
I’m always hesitant to drag books written in a different era through today’s sensibilities.
For all the complaints of these books today (and I’ve complained about Lean Startup as recently as Dec 2024) these were written in a different time and likely written about tactics obsolete at the time of publication.
I have the complete opposite take to the person who wrote this article.
Most business books are collections of experiences with the takeaways that a person had based on those experiences, whether strategy, market dynamics of the time, unique insight, etc.
It's the readers job to understand and apply what is applicable to their situation. To say the study of past history is unless because businesses are no longer doing great is crazy. That would be like an athlete saying Tiger Woods' golf swing advice is no longer relevant because he was only good in hindsight, and he can't do it anymore.
Every single "counterexample" in this article is just hindsight, which, ironically, is the article's argument for why business books are useless. They just wrote their own survivorship-biased article version of one.
It's only now that we realize that AirBnb would cannibalize the hotel business. If people had known that before, they wouldn't have had trouble raising money. Replacing a Ritz Carlton AND a Holiday Inn with a random person's home was so far from obvious.
It's only now that we realize that Stripe was focused on years of operational excellence and not a gimmick of "take payments with 7 lines of code." Replace it with AI and you have a tangential version of the tagline on every SaaS company's homepage today.
It's only now that Apple has the product experience to not build MVPs where, before, they were about to go bankrupt doing the same thing.
The "mistakes" the person made were all covered in the books they read. And all of the things they say they wanted are tactical (LTV:CAC, Incentive Design, Churn, etc.), which makes sense as they are a quant.
I would have more respect if people who bash business books could have called all of the "counterexamples" this person gave (which would mean they would be billionaires) or could call the current day examples that will not be true in 15 years by putting their money behind them OR their businesses go on to be successful (by whatever metric you want) for the next 20 years.
It's just not that easy, there are no silver bullets, but it's useful to study what has already been done.
The problem I have with this book could be a short article is that the actual stories are often useful. I don't disagree in general that a lot of these books could be 100 pages rather than 300 pages but I'm also not sure they could be magazine articles even if their core content could probably fit in that space.
Spicy take: read the narrative non-fiction business books. They are written for entertainment and sit in the business section but you can learn things.
barbarians at the gate
when genius failed
bad blood
billion dollar whale
chaos monkey
liars poker
shoe dog
american kingping
broken code
soul of a new machine
and so on. There is nothing wrong with entertainment and since these are usually written by journalists or professional writers, the writing is often better.
Agree. This is a great list. I’ve read 7 of them and frequently remember actionable anecdotes, whereas I hardly remember the key point from “serious” business books.
And that makes perfect sense. There’s a reason why we tell children social norms via fairy tales and monster stories; humans are very susceptible to a good tale, those tend to stick in your brain like little else.
Great list! If you are interested in complicated deals I strongly recommend Eccentric Orbits, about the Iridium satellite network. Its a real page turner. Also perhaps House of Krupp, though that one is a bit dark.
I picked up Barbarians at the Gate the other year, but put it down when I realized all it was doing was making me fantasize about all the useless toys I could buy myself if I was really rich. A good book to read if you want to dream about being an avaricious plutocrat.
Personally I'd like to see more rich people follow the Bill Gates model of giving almost all of it away.
Interesting, I can't recall any specific expensive toy except that the RKR guy's wife liked expensive interior design, and my main takeaway from it was "accountants can make unimaginable amounts of money, both by creating value and destroying it, pay attention to the accounting perspective".
This is a personal thing and probably not good, but I just hate narratives. Like stories are so contingent and our interpretation of our lives so irrational that I have almost no interest in the peculiar sequence of events that constitute people's lives. I especially dislike them when someone has curated them into a book, because that process is also often disingenuous, self-laudatory, irrational, or pulled around by other incentives.
I love people, I just don't care that much about how they think they got where they are.
There is a spicy quote which I resonate with. Something to the effect of tiny minds think about people, bigger minds think about events and galaxy brains think about ideas. When I read, I just really want to get to the ideas. I could not give two shits about people and I barely care about the events.
I sympathize with your view and I dislike it as much as the next guy when people prove dubious points from poorly convincing stories, but here's how I view things: badly told stories are frustrating, and it is difficult to tell stories well.
The thing with (real) stories is they relate facts in a structured and somewhat neutral way (causality). This allows you, the reader, to learn things that are beyond the author's point. Essays, on the other hand, don't allow that as authors can (should) always leave out everything that does not support their point without compromising the text.
I totally agree with the sentiment. I am pretty skeptical of this sort of broad advice. People who achieve success did so under specific conditions. It is unclear which aspects of their strategy are universal and which were only effective under their conditions. Advice based on a broader survey of examples may be a bit better but we need to be honest about how hard it is to extract meaningful insights from this sort of thing. Even something like the time period you picked your examples from has huge implications for what you are studying.
Thank you, most of these books are actively harmful, and the lack of intellectual rigor makes them exactly this, entertainment masquerading as education.
What matters is humility, thoughtfulness, and a relentless focus on quality. These books sell to people that want all of the inspiration with none of the work.
Having come up through hard sciences, I don’t ever know what to do with these kinds of books. If they were written as memoirs, then that’s a different story. That’s all they usually are, but they’re presented in more of an educational/instructional context, yet are devoid of rigor.
I’ve had ‘Running Things’ on my shelf for quite a while, but just don’t feel compelled to read it. To me it’s just a weird genre. Slightly dishonest or something.
A better title to this would have been “MOST Business Books are Entertainment, Not Strategic Tools.”
Certainly, there are the fad books that are useless, but some are quite good and useful. In addition to Good to Great, I’d also include Crossing the Chasm, the Innovator’s Dilemma, Positioning, and The Culting of Brands.
The fact that the author recommends four books at the end shows he really doesn’t believe his own title.
I get it and don’t disagree but isn’t this being too literal? At the limit, isn’t this expecting author to be overly precious with the title? I mean, I could as well ask author to state a precise statistic like “93.76% of business books are entertainment”
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadAn interesting counterpoint to "listen to your customers" is The Innovator's Dilemma, which details how increasing profit and producing a better product for your customers can sometimes make a company vulnerable to disruption.
1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners) 2. Competitive Strategy 3. Discipline of Market Leaders 4. Good to Great 5. Built to Last
I highly recommend Buffett's letters to shareholders https://a.co/d/cc1ufM4 and Goldratt's "The Goal" https://a.co/d/iJjTf1y and Taleb's "Antifragile" https://a.co/d/4bjC74J . Aside from his mathematical treatment's of uncertainty (which are free), I wouldn't recommend any of Teleb's other books.
"Let My People Go Surfing" https://a.co/d/2hq7ngp doesn't work for all business, but I really found it personally inspirational.
- the goal
- 5 dysfunctions of a team
- the first 90 days
A friend swears by:
- atomic habits
- seven habits of highly effective people
(Slightly different genre but quite close)
I disagree on "Seven Habits" as its model of "effectiveness" is only applicable to (for lack of a better term) extroverted vocations.
But I would consider it philosophy, not a "business book".
Oh, man, make that 95% and you would be describing The Innovator Dilemma.
What is up with people that take those ideas they never bothered to read and insist they know them?
Business books are definitely not a perfect substitute for lived experience or having a mentor, but they have certainly helped me.
Valid for any domain for book knowledge vs practical experience.
Reven that being said, there could be value in those ‘repeat’ books inasmuch as one framing/telling may resonate with some more than others and get the message through, even if same message through multiple books.
Preaching to the choir is still practice, and the choir learns new ways to say the same thing. It’s not completely useless.
I hope people don't expect to get an MBA's worth of content from a single book. Business is a subject that can be taught in schools or learned through self-study - either requires time and dedication. Whichever method you choose, you'll still need real-world experience to master it.
EDIT : Something related but slightly less wasteful of your time :
Carmen by Stromae :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU
“The Iliad” is basically “Achilles gets insulted and sits out the battle, while everyone else tries to win everlasting glory through bravery until Achilles finally has had enough and kills Hector.” But nobody is going to be reading that summary for 2500 years.
This extends beyond the paragraph. You can get very far by reading the table of contents, the introduction and the conclusion of a scientific book. Dive in only if you need details or quotes ;)
1. You need enough paper to create an object with a noticeable mass that takes time to work all the way through. Too small or short and it doesn't feel worth it. Make it short enough and people could read it in the book store.
2. People are bad at applying a crystalized abstraction in day-to-day life. They are better at learning narratives and fitting the current situation to the closest learned narrative, and then acting out the part of the protagonist. Instead of explaining a statistic or explicit rule of thumb, it would be more effective to give a bunch of examples where someone successfully applies the rule and is rewarded. Those examples can take up many pages.
People felt 5-10 minutes isn't enough time for something as serious as insurance.. but 25-30 is so long it turns people away... And then 5%, maybe even 10% savings isn't enough to go through the effort, but 25% seems unrealistic....
You need a document long enough to seem informative and authoritative without being too extreme in any way... Then you can slap a price on it and call it a book!
Reading a 3 minute summary, once, I will easily forget the knowledge. But reading about the idea with different stories and other auxiliary information help me retain the principles much faster.
Reading a book is not just “downloading a knowledge into your brain”.
Reading is more like executing a program and seeing dofferent result in dofferent people. People will reflect in a different way and come out with different takes, emphasize points, lessons, and takeaways
"Focus on value creation. Execution beats ideas. Leadership and culture matter."
So maybe your idea has a future...
Despite constant complaints about the padding in many non-fiction books (not just business) there's clearly a silent majority who feel like "If I'm going to bother, ugh, opening a book then I want it to be as thick as possible".
For that matter, you see a similar dynamic on the fiction side too with novellas and short stories bring far distant in popularity to novels. (Even though those same people have zero issues watching 22 minute TV episodes.)
Then there was the delightful Bluffer's Guides series.
I like shorter novels and short stories myself, especially in SF where ideas matter.
I really felt like I was fluffing up a book when I went through a publisher. For the second edition I felt it was a bit better as I trimmed some stuff and added a dedicated chapter with a legal co-worker. But it's downside to working through a publisher. Probably won't do it again and have self-published other shorter works.
> He later earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. Covey was the starting quarterback on BYU's football team during the 1987 and 1988 seasons, where he led his team to two bowl games
> Covey worked at Deloitte and Touche consulting in Boston, followed by Trammel Crow Ventures in Dallas.
Stephen junior:
> He received an MBA from Harvard Business School
> He is the father of NFL wide receiver and return specialist Britain Covey.
What is seen as window dressing, is often essential tapestry that provides context.
It's the same for business books. A 30-page book won't sell, but a 250 one is a best seller.
The first set is supposed to be the "good" ones, but a lot of people will add books from the second set there too.
Kindness, democracy, business, performance in sport, scientific method etc.
I don't know one good idea that can't be communicated in a page or less.
Of course it is hard work to distill something complex, but I have some naive intuition that it would actually be possible.
I find it extremely annoying in books, but I don’t mind it at all with audiobooks, it drives the point home and makes you think about the idea and how you could apply it in your own life while you are going for a walk or doing the dishes.
The reason many business books feel fluffy is that these 15-20 pages of solid content are spread over 300 pages to meet the expectations of readers and booksellers.
I don't know you but there's a good chance that you're not doing all of those things. There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice. There's a small chance that simply hearing those condensed words will change your behavior.
To change how we think and act we need good stories. This is what books are, including these business books. Good stories that take a simple idea and wrap it in anecdotes, justification, shock value, and entertainment so that they stick in your head and perhaps convince you to act in a certain way, at least sometimes.
> There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice.
I just want to note that I do not agree with the above advice. Tobacco and alcohol in moderation are key parts of a healthy life. Abstention is neurotic and thus unhealthy.
So, you know, these ideas are out there.
But all of those will improve the quality of one’s life, and thus improve one mental health.
There was some evidence that pointed to some benefits to occasional minimal alcohol consumption, but in more recent years, the scientific opinion is that there are no safe amounts of alcohol consumption.
Alcohol has a side benefit that it generally encourages socializing, and being among people DOES have big health benefits. However, if you can have meaningful relationships and socialize WITHOUT consuming alcohol, that is even better.
I'm willing to bet that me stating that did not convince you in the slightest. However, if you read a book or two, were presented with evidence, written in more elegant prose, there is a bigger chance that you might be willing to start believing it.
Just stating things does very little, and that is why books are valuable.
That is incorrect. For it to be true, a single drink in one’s life would be an unsafe amount — and that is clearly nonsense.
Alcohol and tobacco have positive and negative mental, physical and spiritual effects. Abused, they are terrible. Employed properly, they are key factors in a balanced, pleasant, meaningful and rewarding life — a healthy life.
I do acknowledge that the balance may be much less than folks commonly use. I hope that weekly use of alcohol and tobacco is safe enough, but fear that daily use may not be. I will not accept that yearly use is negative.
I tried Blinkist (audio book summary service), but after listening to 20 summaries, I think I would have learnt more by just reading 1 book in full.
* the secret life of groceries * omnivore's dillema * toy story * the box
as business books. they have a bunch of case studies and union politics and a general idea theyre trying to convey.
without industry experience, i wouldnt conceive that there's an occupation of "buyer" or what it is they do, without having read those books.
For all the complaints of these books today (and I’ve complained about Lean Startup as recently as Dec 2024) these were written in a different time and likely written about tactics obsolete at the time of publication.
Let’s allow them to be artifacts of their time.
Most business books are collections of experiences with the takeaways that a person had based on those experiences, whether strategy, market dynamics of the time, unique insight, etc.
It's the readers job to understand and apply what is applicable to their situation. To say the study of past history is unless because businesses are no longer doing great is crazy. That would be like an athlete saying Tiger Woods' golf swing advice is no longer relevant because he was only good in hindsight, and he can't do it anymore.
Every single "counterexample" in this article is just hindsight, which, ironically, is the article's argument for why business books are useless. They just wrote their own survivorship-biased article version of one.
It's only now that we realize that AirBnb would cannibalize the hotel business. If people had known that before, they wouldn't have had trouble raising money. Replacing a Ritz Carlton AND a Holiday Inn with a random person's home was so far from obvious.
It's only now that we realize that Stripe was focused on years of operational excellence and not a gimmick of "take payments with 7 lines of code." Replace it with AI and you have a tangential version of the tagline on every SaaS company's homepage today.
It's only now that Apple has the product experience to not build MVPs where, before, they were about to go bankrupt doing the same thing.
The "mistakes" the person made were all covered in the books they read. And all of the things they say they wanted are tactical (LTV:CAC, Incentive Design, Churn, etc.), which makes sense as they are a quant.
I would have more respect if people who bash business books could have called all of the "counterexamples" this person gave (which would mean they would be billionaires) or could call the current day examples that will not be true in 15 years by putting their money behind them OR their businesses go on to be successful (by whatever metric you want) for the next 20 years.
It's just not that easy, there are no silver bullets, but it's useful to study what has already been done.
barbarians at the gate
when genius failed
bad blood
billion dollar whale
chaos monkey
liars poker
shoe dog
american kingping
broken code
soul of a new machine
and so on. There is nothing wrong with entertainment and since these are usually written by journalists or professional writers, the writing is often better.
Personally I'd like to see more rich people follow the Bill Gates model of giving almost all of it away.
I love people, I just don't care that much about how they think they got where they are.
There is a spicy quote which I resonate with. Something to the effect of tiny minds think about people, bigger minds think about events and galaxy brains think about ideas. When I read, I just really want to get to the ideas. I could not give two shits about people and I barely care about the events.
The thing with (real) stories is they relate facts in a structured and somewhat neutral way (causality). This allows you, the reader, to learn things that are beyond the author's point. Essays, on the other hand, don't allow that as authors can (should) always leave out everything that does not support their point without compromising the text.
What matters is humility, thoughtfulness, and a relentless focus on quality. These books sell to people that want all of the inspiration with none of the work.
I’ve had ‘Running Things’ on my shelf for quite a while, but just don’t feel compelled to read it. To me it’s just a weird genre. Slightly dishonest or something.
Certainly, there are the fad books that are useless, but some are quite good and useful. In addition to Good to Great, I’d also include Crossing the Chasm, the Innovator’s Dilemma, Positioning, and The Culting of Brands.
The fact that the author recommends four books at the end shows he really doesn’t believe his own title.
- High output management
- The hard thing about hard things
- The Great CEO Within
- Who - a method for hiring
(I've also bought and given away multiple copies of each of these books.)