Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time

Discussion from a week or two ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43940747

These books are all either written by ghost authors, or journalists given such privileged access to the source material, that they feel a debt to the subjects. I read them, but do so with a bullshit-filter on. They become far more useful with a critical eye.

For example, in "The Founders - story of PayPal" the author fawns over how great one of the Founders at PayPal was at SQL. The Founder would often jump in and fix issues alongside the admins, build dbs for features and front-end forms to populate them. The founder reduces headcount at the end of a feature build-out to reduce running costs, as maintenance wasn't important on these features. Later in the book, the company almost goes bankrupt due to the high fraud rates on the platform, specifically, they struggled with SQL-injection issues. The author doesn't manage to make the connection between these three events, but a modestly-technical reader with a critical eye can see that the company was haemorrhaging money because a Founder over-indexed on their own competency. Later, the same founder orders a ground-up rewrite of PayPal in .Net, at the dismay of his entire technical team. This almost bankrupts the company a second time, and wastes an entire fundraising round's money.

The book is presented as a kind of victory-lap, honouring the effort, grit, nous, and determination of the Founding Team. But with the right eye, the book is a case-study in how PayPal was nearly destroyed dozens of times by the competency of its Founding Team.

You can read every business book with this filter, and you get much more out of them for it.

I had an entrepreneurship class at school. The teacher was an absolute fan of this kind of books and would assign them as mandatory reading.

As I could not help but find most of it intellectually insulting (sorry to be so blunt), I decided to give it a positive twist and review them as products themselves rather than as useful content. I wrote about how the book identified popular wishes like financial success and applied biases like appeals to authority to provide a believable path forward for the reader.

Man did he not like it, I think it was my lowest grade ever :)

Cynical is easy, and the article is not entirely misguided in why those books are rationalized, retrospective narratives (as JACK puts it), however, stories do help inspire.

While they should not be read for prescriptive purposes, they can be a font of connections to draw from if one is in the knowledge business. People like fables, stories, patterns leading to success, etc.

Good book recommendations at he end though - dry, but supplementary (also shouldn't be prescriptive!). Experience trumps all.

The authors need to compete against other books. Book sale targets means it has to appeal to anyone vaguely business-y in the airport book shop. That plus shorter attention spans in general plus need to cater to a wide audience forces the authors to market it on a "One trick doctors hate" level magic fixes.

They of course fail to deliver on that, but don't think that makes them entirely a waste of time. As article author says "partly true".

Which is OK. I read Liars Poker because I enjoyed it, not because I'm about to be a world class bond trader

The worst example I've ever encountered was a book claiming to teach the leadership principles of Genghis Khan.

Apparently the Mongol who butchered and enslaved the largest land area in the history of conquest, was a tolerant and forgiving leader who promoted "can-do" self-motivators and... endless honeyed BS about what a good leader is.

Nothing in the book whatsoever about the benefits of slaughtering all the male adults of newly acquired companies, and giving their wives as presents to underlings and the acquisition team lawyers. 0/10 for historical accuracy.

I've made a habit of regularly ordering in out-of-print business books when I see them recommended by people whose writing I have found useful. Some highlights have been 'The Rickover Effect', which details the construction of the first nuclear power plants, and 'Selling Microsoft', which discusses the day-to-day life and structure of enterprise technology salespeople in the 90s.

By far the best has been 'Managing the Design Factory' by Donald Reinertsen, which I strongly recommend to software engineering managers. I really appreciated the exploration of how organising teams and tasks impacts development speed, cost, performance and unit cost in different ways. Even though it was written in the 90s, I don't think I've seen as good a discussion on how architectural decisions impact corporate strategy.

A great podcast about this is “If Books Could Kill”, where they critique these type of self-help books.

I find that these books have to be read by the right person at the right time. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill did nothing for me when I first was exposed to it, but later on, helped me greatly.

BTW, the business book that helped me the most is barely known: Making Money is Killing Your Business by Chuck Blakeman.

None of the books the books where are business books.

This is true in general. The article starts with a prime example that's plagiarized from Sun Tsu, Which has been the template for dozens to hundreds of ghostwritten "business" books meant to polish the reputation of the name on the cover.

Every now and then you encounter someone who's too busy for bullshit. Jeff Bussgang teaches a startup course at HBS and is general partner at Flybridge. His recent book The Experimentation Machine is a concise blast of information on how to do a start up right now. No self aggrandizement. A distinct lack of the personal pronoun "I." The example scenarios in the book are not cherry picked outliers meant to make a CEO or investor look good. This kind of book is remarkable for not following the business book formula.

Everything is obvious after the fact. Thiel very clearly stated that capitalism is about building monopolies, not competition. It's something that not only enterpreneurs miss, but also basically everybody else.

> Apple avoided MVPs, choosing instead to launch highly polished products.

This point is flawed though, and doesn't account for the same advantage that the author ascribes to, say, Peter Thiel: being already established and having already great advantage (large amount of capital and a very recognizable and trusted brand).

The author is comparing startup companies launching an MVP (their first product) to established multi-national companies launching their 100th products 25-30+ years after being created. Quite literally apple-to-oranges (pun not intended) comparison.

btw: if you look at pictures of the Apple 1 (for example at https://www.apple1registry.com/en/71.html) you'll see a computer that's not very polished at all, because it was sold either as a kit (that you would assemble yourself) or as motherboard only.

After reading this line I question the coherence of the reasoning about other books.

This reads like ai slop