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 · 1h 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.
ldoughty · 18m 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!
econ · 1h 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.
bdangubic · 38m ago
“7 habits…” made an empire from 7 common-sense things in a book form :)
ghaff · 1h 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.
jeron · 1h ago
Naval has said most books could be essays and most essays could be tweets
tiffanyh · 1h ago
I’d say most books period, not just business books - could be shortened to just a couple of pages.
prewett · 19m 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.
peterlk · 3h 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.
calmbonsai · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
dentemple · 1h 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.
Esophagus4 · 2h ago
Thanks, you just saved me half of my reading list!
drob518 · 6m 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.
adamgordonbell · 1h ago
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 · 8m 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 · 58m ago
don't forget the smartest guys in the room
MantisShrimp90 · 24m 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.
BeetleB · 1h ago
Most popular nonfiction is entertainment. When I realized this I went back to reading fiction. The quality of entertainment is so much better!
rodolphoarruda · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
d_silin · 2h 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.
rfarley04 · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
morsecodist · 45m 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.
deepsquirrelnet · 11m 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.
motoxpro · 1h 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 · 58m 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.
garrickvanburen · 1h 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.
redeux · 2h 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 · 2h ago
Read to the end ... he mentioned four examples of good books.
redeux · 1h ago
It’s very poorly written then. It has a clickbait title and uses content that is easily dismissed before getting to the point.
JohnnyHerz · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 59m 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
121789 · 1h 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
firesteelrain · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
unmole · 39m ago
I'd extend it to business news.
8note · 1h 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.
bsder · 1h ago
And are often complete fiction. See: In Search of Excellence
jibal · 2h ago
Bottom line: entrepreneurs writing books are trying to make a buck off of readers.
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!
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
* 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.