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.
alphazard · 2h ago
As I see it there are 2 likely reasons for this.
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.
itake · 1h ago
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.
ldoughty · 1h ago
Point 1 is a good example of the GEICO jingle.
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!
vivzkestrel · 51m ago
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
WheelsAtLarge · 16m ago
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.
econ · 2h ago
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.
jeron · 3h ago
Naval has said most books could be essays and most essays could be tweets
bdangubic · 2h ago
“7 habits…” made an empire from 7 common-sense things in a book form :)
codeproject · 48m ago
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.
monkeyelite · 1h ago
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.
bdangubic · 1h ago
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
tomrod · 53m ago
How to win friends and influence people remains one of the better ones. Most of its chapters are only a handful of pages.
ghaff · 2h ago
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.
BenFranklin100 · 1h ago
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.
tiffanyh · 3h ago
I’d say most books period, not just business books - could be shortened to just a couple of pages.
prewett · 1h ago
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.
s0rr0wskill · 1m ago
action > over everything
you can read a million business books and know less compared to if you just did the thing you were reading about even if you failed
WheelsAtLarge · 5m ago
Most books are read for entertainment. I've known many people who have read tons of books but couldn't remember most of what they've read. Every once in a while, a book sparks some interest but most will be read for entertainment.
I used to think that a well-read individual was a well informed and smart. No, they just read books for entertainment. It's not a bad thing but let's be clear about that. It's just entertainment.
nazgul17 · 1m ago
True, but books are also valuable for the subtle ways in which they change you, not just for what you remember.
s0rr0wskill · 2m ago
this is me with media in general i cant remember much of anything i consume
timoth3y · 30m ago
There is also a strong signaling effect.
For better or worse, which books people are reading (or say they are reading) is often used to determine which "camp" they belong to. People who took the time to read Musk's biography are viewed slightly differently than those who chose not to.
IRL, discussions of the contents and ideas tend to be superficial.
When I'm asked what books I'm reading, I always answer honestly, but rarely mention a title that's been published in the last 30 years or so. For some reason, people seem to be more comfortable deeply discussing older works.
peterlk · 4h ago
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.
dentemple · 3h ago
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.
calmbonsai · 3h ago
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.
airstrike · 3h ago
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.
Esophagus4 · 3h ago
Thanks, you just saved me half of my reading list!
WoodenChair · 50m ago
I've read over 100 business books. Why? Because I enjoy the genre and its many sub-genres. From both an entertainment and a practical perspective. And that's also why I co-host the podcast Business Books & Co. [0].
In my opinion, the author of this post is correct about his criticisms of the specific books in the post (we did several of them on the show). Many business books overly generalize, are not empirically rigorous, and are better seen as anecdotal and/or entertainment.
But you also need to understand that "business books" is a very broad category that includes many sub-genres like entrepreneurial storytelling (Shoe Dog), "big idea" books (Zero to One), career up-skilling (Radical Candor), economic history (Titan), and self-help (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Many of these cross over into non-business genres as well.
So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do. He's mostly speaking about the "big idea" books as if those are the whole genre. What is a business book? It's ill-defined but I think there are many great ones outside the "big idea" space. For example, we just interviewed John Romero on the show to discuss his 2023 autobiography Doom Guy[1]. In my opinion, it is absolutely a wonderful business book from the entrepreneurial storytelling sub-genre. But it doesn't fit the mold that this post talks about.
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.
JSR_FDED · 1h ago
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.
milkshakes · 2h ago
don't forget the smartest guys in the room
sam1r · 1h ago
Thank you so much for this list composition.
MantisShrimp90 · 1h ago
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.
rodolphoarruda · 4h ago
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.
bpmct · 3h ago
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.
BeetleB · 3h ago
Most popular nonfiction is entertainment. When I realized this I went back to reading fiction. The quality of entertainment is so much better!
d_silin · 4h ago
"An ounce of practice beats a pound of theory, but a pound of practice needs an ounce of theory."
Valid for any domain for book knowledge vs practical experience.
morsecodist · 2h ago
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.
rfarley04 · 3h ago
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.
hinkley · 3h ago
I made a transition about fifteen years ago to reading some books to review them in case someone asks me for a recommendation
Preaching to the choir is still practice, and the choir learns new ways to say the same thing. It’s not completely useless.
motoxpro · 2h ago
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.
ghaff · 2h ago
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.
drob518 · 1h ago
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.
thecaio · 1h ago
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”
redeux · 3h ago
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.
jibal · 3h ago
Read to the end ... he mentioned four examples of good books.
redeux · 3h ago
It’s very poorly written then. It has a clickbait title and uses content that is easily dismissed before getting to the point.
jibal · 51m ago
No.
garrickvanburen · 3h ago
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.
Let’s allow them to be artifacts of their time.
JohnnyHerz · 4h ago
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
calmbonsai · 3h ago
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.
pbh101 · 2h ago
For me:
- 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)
mrbluecoat · 2h ago
I also came to mention E-myth Revisited since its goal is to dissuade rather than promote. Same vibe as https://sive.rs/a
monkeyelite · 1h ago
The E-myth is good. It convinced me I do not want to run a business.
121789 · 3h ago
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
rahimnathwani · 1h ago
Some of the business books that I always keep within easy reach of my desk:
- 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.)
firesteelrain · 3h ago
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
pbh101 · 2h ago
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.
Lienetic · 1h ago
Can anyone share some examples they think are strategic tools? I've read a solid number of these and am genuinely interested.
deepsquirrelnet · 1h ago
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.
8note · 3h ago
i think of books like
* 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.
unmole · 2h ago
I'd extend it to business news.
bsder · 3h ago
And are often complete fiction. See: In Search of Excellence
jibal · 3h ago
Bottom line: entrepreneurs writing books are trying to make a buck off of readers.
timewizard · 56m ago
Nuh uh. I got Gary V's new book, Day Trading Attention: How to Actually Build Brand and Sales in the New Social Media World, on my shelf and it is my new bible! The secret has been unlocked and given to me. For just $19.99. Why can't you believe it?! Why can't you just be _happy_ for me, for once?!
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.
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.
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!
It's the same for business books. A 30-page book won't sell, but a 250 one is a best seller.
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.
What is seen as window dressing, is often essential tapestry that provides context.
“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.
you can read a million business books and know less compared to if you just did the thing you were reading about even if you failed
I used to think that a well-read individual was a well informed and smart. No, they just read books for entertainment. It's not a bad thing but let's be clear about that. It's just entertainment.
For better or worse, which books people are reading (or say they are reading) is often used to determine which "camp" they belong to. People who took the time to read Musk's biography are viewed slightly differently than those who chose not to.
IRL, discussions of the contents and ideas tend to be superficial.
When I'm asked what books I'm reading, I always answer honestly, but rarely mention a title that's been published in the last 30 years or so. For some reason, people seem to be more comfortable deeply discussing older works.
In my opinion, the author of this post is correct about his criticisms of the specific books in the post (we did several of them on the show). Many business books overly generalize, are not empirically rigorous, and are better seen as anecdotal and/or entertainment.
But you also need to understand that "business books" is a very broad category that includes many sub-genres like entrepreneurial storytelling (Shoe Dog), "big idea" books (Zero to One), career up-skilling (Radical Candor), economic history (Titan), and self-help (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Many of these cross over into non-business genres as well.
So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do. He's mostly speaking about the "big idea" books as if those are the whole genre. What is a business book? It's ill-defined but I think there are many great ones outside the "big idea" space. For example, we just interviewed John Romero on the show to discuss his 2023 autobiography Doom Guy[1]. In my opinion, it is absolutely a wonderful business book from the entrepreneurial storytelling sub-genre. But it doesn't fit the mold that this post talks about.
0: http://businessbooksandco.com
1: https://pnc.st/s/business-books/e9076f47/doom-guy-with-john-...
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.
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.
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.
Preaching to the choir is still practice, and the choir learns new ways to say the same thing. It’s not completely useless.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
- 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.)
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.
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.
* 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.