Having read hundreds of books over 25 years, here’s what I think about business books:
- To understand some domain you need knowledge + insights + discernment. Books give you knowledge. Only when you apply you will get discernment. When you apply you will get specific questions which then triggers seeking more knowledge.
- Every book is a map. It leaves out a lot so readers can understand the domain. If your interest align with that map, you'll find the book useful. Otherwise it turns out to be a fluff
- Most books could be a tweet (directive). Once you understand something, it could be expressed as a directive. Until then, you need stories, explanations, and nuance.
- Jesus' command: love God and love others is a short directive of Ten commandments, which in themselves are condensed directives of the Bible. When we hear only the directive, we lose the context and we misunderstand. That's where stories come into play. Tim Ferriss' "4 hour week" makes sense when you read all the stories (playbooks, delegations etc). You leave all of that out, "4 hour week" is a (misunderstood) crap.
- Don't read recently published books. wait at least until 5 years. Let it be looked at it from all angles. Then read it.
- If you want to learn emerging topic (like GenAI), don't read books. Join communities and learn from them. Like Perplexity community for GenAI.
- Read practicing philosophers. When you want to learn swimming, learn from swimmers turned coach, not someone who stood by poolside and watched 10000 swimmers (like Jim Collins did)
- Read annual letters to shareholders (by Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Biglari ...). They have more signal than noise.
> Read practicing philosophers. When you want to learn swimming, learn from swimmers turned coach, not someone who stood by poolside and watched 10000 swimmers (like Jim Collins did)
I think "turned coach" is incredibly key here. Being a part, or even the head, of a successful business is not sufficient.
It is necessary to test those key insights/theories across the widest possible landscape. Across wildly different businesses with wildly different models, founders and internal cultures. Only then is it possible to meaningfully separate which insights are truly general, and which are heavily contingent on specifics.
The books the author critiques are primarily self-centered stories of success, which don't take sufficient meta-analysis of the context. Not that these stories aren't valuable, but only with a sufficiently robust knowledge of textbook business and economics to take each story sceptically and in context.
Given the consistency with which I've been recommended many of these exact books, I consider the Authors criticism necessary and well founded, if perhaps a bit narrowly focused.
I agree but think "turned coach" is necessary but not sufficient. Being a successful practitioner doesn't require fully and deeply understanding all the key elements which contributed to their success. Many do but certainly not all. Even among those able to introspect and analyze, that doesn't mean they have the skills to teach it to others which requires high-level skills in observation, communication, and adapting to the student's context.
So, I think the best case coach is someone who successfully and repeatedly did it, who understands the key elements of doing it successfully, and has repeatedly taught others to be successful. Even determining that is challenging because successful practitioners turned coach tend to get the best, highest-potential students. In the case of a coach who never did it, if they get even one successful enough student, the reputation effects can quickly compound into getting their pick of the best students.
Further complicating the process of identifying a great coach for you is the meta aspect that student success isn't solely dependent on the quality of the coach or teacher. Student ability, drive and other elements are huge factors. Serially successful coaches are probably demonstrating their ability to identify those innate traits in student selection as much as their teaching ability.
Yep I think people just want the fast track to being rich and are not interested into putting the hours and the grind for it. There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that. But for the most part, that's where the real knowledge is.
They would rather read 10-15 books on marketing rather than study and master a single textbook about marketing. Even when they don't have to master all of it and that would still give them more value and professional knowledge than reading all of these other books.
I read my far share of business books and at some points I was seeing the edutainment behind it and the lack of value that from now on every time I search for a book I start by searching in the textbook section on Amazon not the book section.
> There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that.
I would recommend to you, the author of the OP and others in this thread read “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. It is old but it has had amazing sticking powe in my idea of what is entertainment and what is informational. He argues that many things are made to be entertainment (even some books that are thousands of pages) and challenges readers to consider this when deciding what to invest into. We can’t all be experts on everything so we make decisions, consciously and unconsciously about when and where to draw the line based on what information is available, how it’s presented and how much the value/work tradeoff is to study/consume it in that format.
I think the sting comes when we see people ignore low hanging fruit especially willfully but we would be less critical of someone saying that the task at hand is beyond their current capacity that someone else might be better suited to a particular task or topic.
> There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that. But for the most part, that's where the real knowledge is.
huh, hard disagree on this one. In my experience, there is zero correlation between length and insights.
I don't look for the book with the maximum page length... Plus just talking about page length when talking about book vs textbook it's to miss the critical difference in content, format, and who each is made for. You forgot 2 metrics: ratings, and comments.
Marketing Management by Philip Kotler is the reference.
For the rest it depends on what you need since they are very focused on one domain but for instance for accounting/finance: Cost Accounting by Charles Horngren, or Managerial Accounting for Managers by Eric Noreen is a must.
Strategor - English version by João Albino-Pimentel is amazing. A lot of tools to get started are there with very neat examples from the industry.
I have a few books that are great too. But if there is one to buy it could: The Personal MBA and then for each section get real education one way or another. From textbooks or anything.
The annual letter to shareholders is such a great signal that seems to be missed by a lot of people I encounter in business.
They’ll read current popular books. Or even older ones. But seem to miss scale / times / people / resources and mis apply.*
(I agree with your statement about waiting - or if you want to read it applying heavy discernment ).
However, they don’t seem to have the same interest in reading shareholder letters. I’ll add that certain annual reports can contain really helpful information about economic realities, marketing, logistics, etc.
(Home Depot’s is a surprisingly good example - again- if you apply some discernment to what you’re reading).
*by that I mean if you’re an executive at a 15 person company, that’s experiencing stagnation or slow (3-5% growth) and dealing with physical widgets, trying to emulate Twitter, Airbnb, or SaaS businesses might not be the right move.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve read the blog post as well. I think what’s missing is a list of business books you’d recommend. Otherwise, I’m not sure what kind of business books you’re talking about.
I think the top book for any one person isn't the top book recommended by everyone the most. In my experience I’ve had to wade through 30 books to find my own gem. No aggregate data could have led me more directly to that gem. It takes real work to hunt for what works best and great satisfaction in finding it.
Great comment and blog post man. I think you crystallised what I've been wondering, why do some business or self-improvement books feel they could have been a tweet like you said.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
I believe that almost every single thing you read has some worthwhile knowledge or wisdom, as well as a slew of material that is wrong or irrelevant or based on values that I don't carry. This includes books, blog posts, and sometimes even short form social media posts.
The key is to read with an open mind BUT don't blindly take everything as gospel. Ask yourself "is this surprising?", or "is this new?" and filter it through the "does this apply to me now?" or "is the person who is saying this worth listening to?".
Throwing out any entire book is shortsighted. Even "bad" books have nuggets of wisdom or new ideas or concepts. Not everything applies to your situation. Some things might apply now. Some things might apply at some point in the future, and having read the book you have an arsenal ready to be deployed when the time comes. Some things will never apply.
If I read a book and have one new original perspective or "aha" moment, it's a net positive.
This is true, nearly every book has at least some useful or insightful bits, but our time is limited. If you're reading one book that's mostly uninteresting, you're also not reading all the other books that you could be reading instead. Now I'm not advocating for minmaxing your life down to the point of insanity, but I do think it's sensible to try and pick up good books over bad books — whatever that means to you.
The last part is most important: whatever that means to you.
I've read books that I thought were great at presenting some key concept. Other people would disagree. The key thing is that different people perceive and absorb information in different ways, no one book will appeal to everyone.
Time is limited. But I am not saying "read everything."
I'm saying "read".
If they happen to pick the books from that list, they won't walk away empty-handed. They will learn something. These books happen to be popular, and they are not worthless. They are written in an approachable style that might be more easily digestible than the other books the author recommends. He said that himself -- the books he recommends are not easy reading.
If someone decide to not read these books because of this article, but does not read others about similar topics either, they lose out.
The title says that "business books are entertainment" which on the surface makes it seem like the whole category does not have value. By extension you can extrapolate that reading about business in books is JUST entertainment, hence has no merit value.
I'm not familiar with the books the author recommends, but they made it to my reading list. I think that I might be less entertained by them than the ones he critiques, but I'm sure that they contain some good lessons as well.
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.
> Skips the part that Peter Thiel was already in the top 1% of the population—Stanford-educated, ex-Credit Suisse, and founder of a small capital firm—before PayPal. He wasn’t a struggling outsider with nothing to lose. His advice is filtered through a lens of early privilege and structural advantage.
> The book wraps fatalism in edgy language and markets it as practical wisdom
First the author embraces fatalism, then criticizes fatalism. I guess only one kind is fashionable
Any essay from that book is more concise and more insightful than this substack. The only reason people are commenting is to share their dislike of some business book they read - that’s why nobody is quoting the actual article.
Apple is actually a great example of the MVP concept working. The original iPhone had no front camera, a crappy back camera, a low quality screen, no App Store, and no copy/paste. What it had was a great “feel” and it was intuitive to use. They released it, gathered feedback, and iterated.
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.
I'm skeptical of overly empirical arguments. It's a lot easier to fool someone by citing some unreproducible study or misinterpreted statistic. Tell me a story and I understand it's one story but it might have some kind of meaning or resonance.
The best thing I learn from business book and bios is that it can be done. The people are often very human and flawed. Half of it is just believing you can do it and working hard.
If you look at empirical data you quickly come across efficient market and no free lunch. But it's important to note you are not a statistic and what you do determines your fate. Or at least that's the most productive way to go through life
This kind of underscores the author's point, though. These books in question give the impression that they supply concrete business advice, but much of it is highly non-transferrable. Or at least requires significant discipline to separate the concrete from the self-aggrandization, survivor bias, confirmation bias, etc. They don't get at the heart of the technical, social and political challenges facing an average Joe starting a company. Sure, their journey may inspire you to get moving, but so could Frodos. This doesn't make them a bad book, but they are not scholarly. Realistically, since Frodos story based on a much broader familiarity with human history, it may be significantly more cross-applicable despite being set in fantasy world.
My comment was probably something similar. Are there some general principles? Sure. And I'm glad that Harvard Business School professors, consultants, and successful execs (or their ghostwriters) can elaborate on them as food for thought especially when backed with some data. But I've also heard/read seemingly super-logical cases for various outcomes that ended up simply not happening.
Quite a few pop-non-fic books, especially business, self-help (tons of overlap in form and technique there), and both business and non-business (these latter usually get adopted by the business-side anyway) “big idea” books, not only cite studies of dubious value, but cite sources that don’t include their claim at all, or contradict it.
I enjoy “business fables” like The Goal or The Phoenix Project. Since you must know a fair chunk of the business books - any other good ones in this genre?
I think you're referring to novels that have strong business themes? Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding. That's an interesting sub-genre that we have not yet explored on the show but have discussed doing in the future. In the six years of the show, we have done exclusively non-fiction and I read myself mostly non-fiction. Sorry, therefore no recommendations yet! I'll checkout the ones you mentioned.
DevOps is one of the weird ones because the details are so situational. No one likes to emphatically throw communications between Dev and Ops (and security) under the train. But the reality is that, for large organizations, making it so that different functions don't have to communicate is often the best approach.
I have yet to see DevOps actually executed well. IME, it always winds up with half-assed infrastructure, because devs often have little interest in ops, and even more rarely have any kind of background in it.
The entire concept seems to me like devs noticed that ops folks were often automating large portions of their jobs with shell scripts, and haughtily thought, “we could do so much better with proper tooling and a better language,” completely disregarding the fact that the ops team had decades of combined experience and trauma from past incidents.
I sort of lost interest in a lot of the DevOps culture.
I think when Kubernetes came in for larger orgs (and even before such as OpenShift that I was involved with), the set infra up and get out of the way mindset made a lot of sense. I think there was an attempt to overlay DevOps on what would become Platform Engineering but I'm not sure it ever really made sense.
Content like this has to choose the point they're targeting on a rigorous-education-to-entertaining spectrum.
Chess teaching content that's only for people at ~2300 ELO on how to get from there to 2400 ELO? Potential audience of perhaps 10,000 people worldwide.
Chess-themed entertainment content, with educational content mixed with lots of jokes and memes, accessible to players at all levels? Potential audience of 10,000,000 people.
Likewise, you don't become a bestselling business author if your book on how to be a Fortune 500 CEO only has an audience of 500 people. If your book succeeds, 99.95% of your sales will come from people who don't ever plan or expect to become a Fortune 500 CEO.
It's interesting you use that analogy because my dad was an author of chess books. Yes, many were a niche within a niche and only sold a few thousands copies.
My observations about business books match your intuition—the more popular business books tend to be popular for reasons beyond their educational content. They usually include great storytelling, are meticulously crafted and edited, and are about societally interesting subject matter beyond the pure educational aspects.
But that really makes a difference in your experience as a reader. I'm not saying popular means good. I am saying that on average with all things considered the popular business books tend to be better experiences to read than the unpopular ones. Of course there are exceptions.
One difference is that the chess content you talk about does have educational value - it will make you better chess player although in time ineffective way.
> So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do.
I read most of the main books in the "ideation/innovation/startup/scale-up/ entrepreneurship/business plan writing" available at a certain time, and had to sift through a lot of useless or redundant material to extract very little wisdom from it.
(Of course what is really useful emerges only when you then execute your own start-up idea later.)
The grandparent post cautions from "overgeneralization", so let me add a comment in the opposite direction, namely "undergeneralization": it is not only business books that are more for entertainment (and perhaps reflection) than hard facts; even the category of formal economics/business studies academic literature includes large quantities of claims that do not hold, were not properly assessed, hold no predictive power etc.
I recommend one that positively stands out, Philip E. Tetlock and his studies on forecasting abilities of so-called "experts" versus average person in the street: he wrote several critical studies that found academics (economists/business in particular, hence relevant for this post) and other experts to be lacking, and then developed a methodology for more systematic prediction (e.g. see the book Superforecasting: The Science of Prediction (2016, with Ben Gardner, https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-P...).
Even the reputable books tend to resort to anecdotal evidence and do not evaluate any of their claims. I'd go crazy if I had to read 100 of them but the ones I read were based on 100% survivorship bias and 0% scientific studies.
Personally, it seems to me that general business books --- that is, the ones that aren't textbooks (accounting, microeconomics, etc.) --- are merely a sub-genre of the self-help category and that these books may provide value by giving some motivation and inspiration at best and, at worst, provide huge disvalue by misinforming.
If you’re that keen on business books, I have one that you might enjoy: https://www.sallery.co.uk/lessons. I’ve tried to avoid some of the pitfalls listed in the article, but feedback from someone with broad knowledge of the genre would be most welcome!
You're right. I know! It's our podcast host, Pinecast. They don't provide HTTPS to customers for the website. Luckily very few people find us through the website. The vast majority are followers on Spotify. Thanks for the feedback.
"Business" is so broad it's hard to give you recommendations without knowing what you're looking for. That's kind of the point of my post. But as one example, as I mentioned in my post, I loved Doom Guy. If you're building a business in the video game industry you should definitely check it out.
I would also recommend all of the other books in my post that I mentioned by different sub-genres (Shoe Dog, Radical Candor, etc.).
Agree - but The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt) is a rare exception to this. It’s written as a novel but actually contains valuable and counterintuitive lessons about optimizing for efficiency in a complex delivery process. Worth every page
> These aren’t easy reads.
> They require real cognitive effort.
> But they offer lasting value.
Here we go, that's the real problem today, the lack of focus and not being able anymore to invest cognitive effort in long lasting things. Everything was turning into a short/reel/tiktok already, add llms for quick answers to the formula and that's a perfect recipe for disaster
> add llms for quick answers to the formula and that's a perfect recipe for disaster
I understand some books are worth their weight in gold. The real worry is, now that LLMs can "deep search" & present larger reports, some of which I read religiously without gaining much for the time invested, I find myself preferring shorter answers.
That is, the feedback mechanism (of larger LLM output being too verbose than being too substantive) is reinforcing rewards for shorter and shorter text spans.
Then when I switch to reading long form articles, long instructional/educational videos, or book chapters, I have caught myself running out of patience and reaching for summarisation by LLMs (sometimes, when I've bothered to check the original source, LLMs have thoroughly misinterpreted or skipped key thesis/points... Kind of the reverse "miss the forest for the trees").
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.
Most books published aren’t worth the readers time. After 30 years, there’s been some distillation, and the ones still in popular culture are higher quality.
You have deeper discussions about older books because the median surviving older book is more worthy of discussion than the median new book.
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.
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.
The problem with books in general and articles is that they always refer some more books to read or go indepth so it has caused me to move even far away from taking action- even the best/top 10 books is not the final list as they themselves refer another 20-50 books so i feel like its never ending cycle of slippery slope. I have completely given up on reading books and occassionaly chatgpt the problems i am currently faciing and go from there rather than ever reading a single book or article.
> Read no business books. Read Sun Tzu and Thucydides. They were contemporaries a world apart from one another and 25 centuries apart from us, yet no modern quarrel nor accomplishment escapes their analysis.
Tim Sweeney has just won one of the rounds in his own version of the Peloponnesian war. I ended up listening to Kenneth W. Harl's "Great Courses" lecture series on The Peloponnesian War and it was mind blowing. One of the best lecture series I've ever listened to.
There's another, similar genre of non-fiction books: Sapiens, Outliers etc. I notice these tend to be unusually popular with people who have too short an attention span to absorb knowledge rigorously (e.g. high net-worth individuals), and would rather prefer it be weaved into a narrative, even at the cost of some accuracy. Bonus if the narrative confirms their preconceived notions. For a while, I myself was guilty of consuming both these and business books. I still occasionally read them, but now I recognise them as entertainment and am under no illusion about rigour or practical application.
Those books switch reader's nob one click up, so they become 1% more informed than the average who haven't read the same content (yet). That 1% looks/sounds incredibly a lot more. "OMG, he said neanderthals and homo-sapiens coexisted somewhere in time. What a genius!". This kind of reaction.
Damn, you could have cribbed this list from my own notes on various business/startup books over the years.
I like the idea that business books have an emotional appeal. I think it comes from buying the book itself. The more famous a book is, the more people will feel good about reading it, no matter how little it practically benefits them. I think there's a related psychological effect where luxury items sometimes sell more when their price increases.
I think that most business books hyperfocus on one or a few simplified "rules" (hell, Ray Dalio's book is literally called "Principles") and ignore any messy complications or cofactors. If you really want a laugh, read Smart's "Topgrading" which spends an entire half a book telling you that later chapters are going to really improve your hiring process, and the second half of the book repeating some simple rules without bothering to defend them against obvious objections. "Punished by Rewards" makes a simple case and then burns through the remainder of the pages dissing Skinner. "Built to Last" is a collection of anecdotes about business that make bold and authoritative statements that are still up for debate (such as where exactly Hewlett Packard went wrong). "Blitzscaling" hangs its entire thesis on the success of the Sambear brothers, which seems ridiculous to me.
The best book on this subject I've read is Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. The entire premise is backward. You don't just look at success to find the source of success with out introducing a massive amount of survivorship biases.
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.
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.
One thing that’s common in most business and productivity books is that they use an awful lot of words to say things that either don’t mean much or aren’t really replicable. Ton of nonfiction books suffer from the same issue and could easily just be a blog post.
I still read them now and then because I figure it’s better to read Mark Manson than scroll through TikTok or get sucked into some other Gen Z brainrot.
1. Quality and information-density vary widely. The author of the post lists some of the least useful (but popular) business books, but there are better ones. The benchmark for me is does the book contains specific, actionable recommendations I can use to bootstrap how I do something I don't already know how to do well and want to get started. If it doesn't it really is just fluff.
2. Even if these books are not that rich in applicable advice, if you read the book and reflect on it and maybe 1% of it is relevant to you and results in some new ideas, is it not worth it?
3. All of these business books now have alternative, compressed representations on YouTube, podcasts, and blogs. Asking a chatbot to review a few of those and produce a summary is often more efficient than reading the book itself. Usually these books have enough content worth for a 3 pages long summary, not for an entire book. And of course you can also listen to an interview with the author or a review from a trustworthy critic, or watch a video.
I strongly dislike business books. Not because I'm disinterested in the topic or dislike the author, but because I'm put off by the presentation as having come up with some new magic formula (I did X and was successful, so all you need to do is X and you'll be successful too), when in fact 90% (95%? 99%?) of the time their success is due to a combination of luck, timing, common sense and perseverance (aka survivorship bias).
I think my repulsion for these books also stems from how we attribute almost mythical status to some of these celebrity business leaders (i.e., Steve Jobs), to where when they do something that any reasonable and not-an-asshole person would do ("he said hello to me in the elevator!", "he wrote me a nice email!") we laud them with praise in amazement.
I do admire what these people have accomplished, but the hero-worship is so off-putting that I have a hard time hearing the message.
I'm not opposed to business books. It's true that most of them are in narrative form and try to extract anecdotal lessons into broad strategy, but I've found them useful for framing my own thinking about teams, strategy, and leadership. Thinking about your work, just in a different way, or though a different lens, I believe is helpful. How helpful? Probably not as much as making more decisions yourself, but at least in my environment I'm rate limited by circumstances beyond my control!
That said, there are a couple of "good" business books, and I agree with the author on the works of Michael Porter (esp. On Competition) and ET Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. The later was a major influence on my life and pivotal book I read as a young scientist, and it moved me into the direction of data science!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
There’s one business book I’ve actually enjoyed reading and somehow learned more from years after reading it than while reading it: Business Adventures.
It’s a bit silly, doesn’t pretend to be a guide, provide any wise advice of any sort, and certainly not to have the one grandiose radical new idea that will solve all your problems™.
I read so many business books, and they are hard to get rid of after you have amassed a large collection of several hundred. On reflection, many seem like crap, or maybe a good few points what could be summarized in a few pages but somehow turned into a long book.
I'm still glad I read them, and the jewels have always made it worth the adventure.
I really like looking back at the discredited books I've read and in hindsight, asked myself how I was fooled at the time in not detecting the the weaknesses in the books. It has always been a point of reflection to improve these detection skills when reading new material.
For me, at the time of reading, the books: "In Search of Excellence" and "Think and Grow Rich" seemed great, but in hindsight, "What was I thinking".
I’m glad Peter Thiel was brought up because he keeps coming up as this Bond villain type of dude when really he was just lucky twice with investments in PayPal and Facebook.
After those payouts plus a bunch of time in the markets, a huge chunk of his net worth is basically just those two jackpots plus not a whole lot more gains than throwing the proceeds into some index funds, maybe just something more aggressive than that because he got to work with enough money where it can be risked more than the average person’s
401k.
My submission to the world is that Peter Thiel is a really average dude in terms of talent and Palantir is more like a boring government contractor with mediocre but specialized software versus the Bond villain spy agency we all take it to be.
In my experience, I find that business books often lean more toward entertainment than providing actual strategic tools. While they can be a great source of inspiration and motivation, they don’t always offer the practical, data-driven strategies that you can directly apply to your business. I appreciate the stories and insights they provide, but I believe that true strategy comes from real-world experience, experimentation, and adapting to the unique needs of your business.
Reading business books can certainly help me think differently or spark new ideas, but for actionable strategies, I usually rely more on hands-on experience, mentorship, and tools that are specifically tailored to my industry. There’s a time for inspiration, but when it comes to building something sustainable, it takes more than just theory.
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.
Business books are like courses, master classes, etc.
It’s just a way to make you feel better because you read something, and now you think you know how it works, but you don’t, so end up reading more and more of them.
There should be a balance between reading and doing, i.e. consumption and production.
I agree with the principle.
Most books in the case study section fall into what I’d call the “self-help-business” category. They’re comforting reads, especially when work isn’t going well. You don’t necessarily turn to them for strategy, but for a boost of optimism or a mental reset, with a dash of hope.
For strategy and execution, I look to Harvard Business Review. Its detailed case studies, frameworks, and exercises address the operational complexities that don’t translate well to mass-market books, which often skip them. They’re dry and time-intensive, but invaluable when you're looking to build real strategic and operational skills.
I'm halfway through Feld and Mendelson's Venture Deals and earlier this year worked through Ittelson's Financial Statements.
Having cofounded a startup that raised investor money before, I can state confidently that both are going to make me better at what I do next time I start something.
Of course, they're not books about "what to do", just "how people do the basics". Which is harder because there's less ambiguity to hide behind. Sometimes my eyes glaze and I need to put them down and wait for a time when I have more energy.
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.
One of the big problems in my experience is that strategies are often both interesting and useful. But the real results are very situational and depend on boots on the ground. I won't single out anyone in particular but I've definitely seen very sensible-seeming frameworks and approaches (which are hard to really argue with in the general case) that led to analyses that empirically turned out to be totally wrong for individual situations.
The only business book I’ve read is that one about management by the CEO of Intel (I forget the name). It helped me a lot with my first big corporate client because until then I had only worked at startups and small businesses. I literally didn’t understand what the purpose of meetings was, etc.
Anyway, I haven’t been compelled to pick up any other business books as most of the popular ones seem like self/help books.
When ever I read an article like this, claming one perspective and interpretation of content. I always remember that everyone has different minds and different ways they make connections between concepts and understanding in their brains. Thats why we don't have a single narrative on how to create understanding of any concept. It's quite sad, I feel sad for the author for his lack of intelectual discovery.
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.
Reading a lot isn’t just about storing and recalling information—it’s also about shaping the way you think.
The same goes for education. If I measured the value of my university years solely by the information I can still recall, I’d consider them rather inefficient. But the real value lay in learning how to learn and how to think through complex problems.
I agree with you, however, there is a difference between being well-ready and widely-read. I think one who can recite the essence of a handful of books has more much to say than someone who can list 50 books they read last year.
You can say the same about movies and documentaries. Why is a book any different?
Yes, books have the power to change you but like anything you have to put in the time to study it and put it into practice. Reading a ton of them and hoping they will change you by osmosis does nothing more than keep your mind busy.
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”
It's not that all business books are worthless, but the article nails how so many are written more to inspire than to inform. They often flatten complex stories into digestible slogans, which can feel empowering in the moment but rarely translate into meaningful action.
I thought "Personal Interlude: Lessons From My Quant Trenches" was just another business book title ready to be criticized. I wondered why the formatting was different on this one, then I slowly realized it wasn’t a business book title at all.
I hate business books with fluff in them. I’m not here to read your poem.
On that note, my brother sent me a book called “Zero Down” by Roland Frasier. It was 75 pages, and not once did I think, “They should’ve trimmed the fat here.”
> In practice, customers buy based on utility and price, not ideology.
That’s not always the case and it varies by sector. A lot of B2B firms may buy that way, but B2C transactions often have emotional or ideological drivers as well.
You can always come up with criticism for anything. Do they deliver some interesting ideas (while understandably they might oversimplify some other aspects) and are not complete frauds? If so there is some value in them.
I've read at-least 4-6 books related to startups, business, habit building etc.. Majority of them could be a blog or few blogs. Sometime I skim through most of the pages to avoid the repetition of the concepts.
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.
Finally, someone putting into words what I have felt intuitively ever since the concept of an "MVP" and the obsession around A/B testing came into vogue. The quotes that most resonated with me:
---
The MVP concept is often overused to justify low-quality products.
Metrics are treated as precise guides without accounting for interpretation or strategy.
---
When I entered the startup world, I mistakenly followed the MVP playbook. We launched too early, misread feedback, and ended up iterating around noise.
What saved the company wasn’t lean methodology. It was building something so good that users couldn’t ignore it.
I’ve hired engineers who were obsessed with quality and passed on candidates with vague “passion.”
Boring and a slog to read. It was a few years back but I don't remember a single interesting take away(I've read hundreds of business books and most I can think of one or two good ideas from). It made me go from someone that thought he was interesting to someone that actively avoids his content.
Most books are junk entertainment, and not what they're, in fact, falsely purported to be. We live in the most insincere period in history thanks to the malign coupling of late stage capitalism and pervasive interconnectedness (smartphones and social media). Everything is simulacra, just an insincere monetization process. Sensationalism is our new God.
> Airbnb didn’t invent a new concept—it executed better within an existing space.
Uhm did it not? If anything it invented two new concepts - paid couch surfing (which it turns out people didn't really want) and unofficial ad-hoc holiday rentals (which people really want).
I'm nitpicking - overall the article is spot on and I'm glad this is getting called out.
Are those new "concepts"?
Uber for your house seems all. Effectively every single business in the gig economy has been rehashing the same concept trying to commodify every aspect of the human experience by inserting a platform as an alternative to a regulated market (or no market at all).
Yeah definitely. There was no way you could rent out your house before Airbnb.
Uber for X is a new concept if nobody has done it before. Sure you can say it's obvious but most business ideas are, especially in hindsight. The idea is the easy part.
Business books and self-help books are for the most part utter garbage and you are possibly going to generate more economic value for your business or your career by reading Vargas Llosa or Tolstoy than by reading all that airport drivel.
The mere concept of a "business book" seems like hamfisted satire. It blows my mind how so many white collar workers genuinely entertain the concept in the first place.
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?!
Pretty cool seeing how folks argue over fluff vs depth in business books - tbh I struggle finishing most of them for this exact reason. you ever hit a book where one small story actually sticks with you way longer than all the big frameworks?
Having read hundreds of books over 25 years, here’s what I think about business books:
- To understand some domain you need knowledge + insights + discernment. Books give you knowledge. Only when you apply you will get discernment. When you apply you will get specific questions which then triggers seeking more knowledge.
- Every book is a map. It leaves out a lot so readers can understand the domain. If your interest align with that map, you'll find the book useful. Otherwise it turns out to be a fluff
- Most books could be a tweet (directive). Once you understand something, it could be expressed as a directive. Until then, you need stories, explanations, and nuance.
- Jesus' command: love God and love others is a short directive of Ten commandments, which in themselves are condensed directives of the Bible. When we hear only the directive, we lose the context and we misunderstand. That's where stories come into play. Tim Ferriss' "4 hour week" makes sense when you read all the stories (playbooks, delegations etc). You leave all of that out, "4 hour week" is a (misunderstood) crap.
- Don't read recently published books. wait at least until 5 years. Let it be looked at it from all angles. Then read it.
- If you want to learn emerging topic (like GenAI), don't read books. Join communities and learn from them. Like Perplexity community for GenAI.
- Read practicing philosophers. When you want to learn swimming, learn from swimmers turned coach, not someone who stood by poolside and watched 10000 swimmers (like Jim Collins did)
- Read annual letters to shareholders (by Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Biglari ...). They have more signal than noise.
I started writing a reply and it became lot bigger than I intended. So I blogged here: https://www.jjude.com/read-biz-books/
> Read practicing philosophers. When you want to learn swimming, learn from swimmers turned coach, not someone who stood by poolside and watched 10000 swimmers (like Jim Collins did)
I think "turned coach" is incredibly key here. Being a part, or even the head, of a successful business is not sufficient.
It is necessary to test those key insights/theories across the widest possible landscape. Across wildly different businesses with wildly different models, founders and internal cultures. Only then is it possible to meaningfully separate which insights are truly general, and which are heavily contingent on specifics.
The books the author critiques are primarily self-centered stories of success, which don't take sufficient meta-analysis of the context. Not that these stories aren't valuable, but only with a sufficiently robust knowledge of textbook business and economics to take each story sceptically and in context.
Given the consistency with which I've been recommended many of these exact books, I consider the Authors criticism necessary and well founded, if perhaps a bit narrowly focused.
> I think "turned coach" is incredibly key here.
I agree but think "turned coach" is necessary but not sufficient. Being a successful practitioner doesn't require fully and deeply understanding all the key elements which contributed to their success. Many do but certainly not all. Even among those able to introspect and analyze, that doesn't mean they have the skills to teach it to others which requires high-level skills in observation, communication, and adapting to the student's context.
So, I think the best case coach is someone who successfully and repeatedly did it, who understands the key elements of doing it successfully, and has repeatedly taught others to be successful. Even determining that is challenging because successful practitioners turned coach tend to get the best, highest-potential students. In the case of a coach who never did it, if they get even one successful enough student, the reputation effects can quickly compound into getting their pick of the best students.
Further complicating the process of identifying a great coach for you is the meta aspect that student success isn't solely dependent on the quality of the coach or teacher. Student ability, drive and other elements are huge factors. Serially successful coaches are probably demonstrating their ability to identify those innate traits in student selection as much as their teaching ability.
Yep I think people just want the fast track to being rich and are not interested into putting the hours and the grind for it. There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that. But for the most part, that's where the real knowledge is.
They would rather read 10-15 books on marketing rather than study and master a single textbook about marketing. Even when they don't have to master all of it and that would still give them more value and professional knowledge than reading all of these other books.
I read my far share of business books and at some points I was seeing the edutainment behind it and the lack of value that from now on every time I search for a book I start by searching in the textbook section on Amazon not the book section.
> There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that.
I would recommend to you, the author of the OP and others in this thread read “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. It is old but it has had amazing sticking powe in my idea of what is entertainment and what is informational. He argues that many things are made to be entertainment (even some books that are thousands of pages) and challenges readers to consider this when deciding what to invest into. We can’t all be experts on everything so we make decisions, consciously and unconsciously about when and where to draw the line based on what information is available, how it’s presented and how much the value/work tradeoff is to study/consume it in that format.
I think the sting comes when we see people ignore low hanging fruit especially willfully but we would be less critical of someone saying that the task at hand is beyond their current capacity that someone else might be better suited to a particular task or topic.
> There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that. But for the most part, that's where the real knowledge is.
huh, hard disagree on this one. In my experience, there is zero correlation between length and insights.
I don't look for the book with the maximum page length... Plus just talking about page length when talking about book vs textbook it's to miss the critical difference in content, format, and who each is made for. You forgot 2 metrics: ratings, and comments.
Can you list some long textbooks on a single subject that are amazing?
PAIP
RE4B
What's a good master-level textbook about marketing?
You probably saw them: Marketing Management and Marketing Principles by Philip Kotler. They are a good starting point.
Can you recommend any textbooks on marketing or another business subject?
Marketing Management by Philip Kotler is the reference.
For the rest it depends on what you need since they are very focused on one domain but for instance for accounting/finance: Cost Accounting by Charles Horngren, or Managerial Accounting for Managers by Eric Noreen is a must.
Strategor - English version by João Albino-Pimentel is amazing. A lot of tools to get started are there with very neat examples from the industry.
I have a few books that are great too. But if there is one to buy it could: The Personal MBA and then for each section get real education one way or another. From textbooks or anything.
The annual letter to shareholders is such a great signal that seems to be missed by a lot of people I encounter in business.
They’ll read current popular books. Or even older ones. But seem to miss scale / times / people / resources and mis apply.* (I agree with your statement about waiting - or if you want to read it applying heavy discernment ).
However, they don’t seem to have the same interest in reading shareholder letters. I’ll add that certain annual reports can contain really helpful information about economic realities, marketing, logistics, etc. (Home Depot’s is a surprisingly good example - again- if you apply some discernment to what you’re reading).
*by that I mean if you’re an executive at a 15 person company, that’s experiencing stagnation or slow (3-5% growth) and dealing with physical widgets, trying to emulate Twitter, Airbnb, or SaaS businesses might not be the right move.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve read the blog post as well. I think what’s missing is a list of business books you’d recommend. Otherwise, I’m not sure what kind of business books you’re talking about.
- In the blog post I linked to the "best business books" by "Personal MBA": https://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
- I talked about 3 letters to shareholders
- And talked about the Bible
- I talked about books by Alan Weiss & Derek Sivers
I think the top book for any one person isn't the top book recommended by everyone the most. In my experience I’ve had to wade through 30 books to find my own gem. No aggregate data could have led me more directly to that gem. It takes real work to hunt for what works best and great satisfaction in finding it.
> isn't the top book recommended by everyone the most
Agreed. everyone's context is different and hence the books are different; even the lesson gained for the same book will be different.
Great comment and blog post man. I think you crystallised what I've been wondering, why do some business or self-improvement books feel they could have been a tweet like you said.
A book doesn't have to be comprehensive to be useful, but knowing when and how to apply its lens is everything
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.
Disagreeable people are insurance policies. When the group is right, they are a drag. When the group is wrong, they are necessary.
Thanks, you just saved me half of my reading list!
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.
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’d like to add Never Lost Again, which is the story of the team that eventually built Google Maps
don't forget the smartest guys in the room
Bethany McLean is great. I also enjoyed "All The Devils Are Here"
Thank you so much for this list composition.
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.
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.
Ideas mean nothing unless they link to meat space
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".
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
It reminds me of the Tao Te Ching of Laozi... and Jesus' parables in the New Testament.
So maybe your idea has a future...
You'll get a 60 pages book, not a 1000 pages one.
Most books rehash the same ideas so you could compress it in a much shorter one
Here you go:
"Focus on value creation. Execution beats ideas. Leadership and culture matter."
Extreme! but a calendar with one of these a day plus a paragraph to explain would be pretty good.
Don't we already have linkedin for those condensed ideas?
That's what "The Personal MBA" book did
3. The idea is trite, and the fluff is there to fool people into thinking it is substantial (i.e. it's not fluff, it's ad copy.)
2 is a good point, but I wonder if it would be best to just drop the pretexts and explicitly describe these stories as Aesop style fables.
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.
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.
You are the first person I have ever seen argue that tobacco in moderation is healthy. Quite the claim.
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.
I have a friend who has claimed, on multiple occasions, that soda pop protects your teeth because the acid kills the bacteria.
So, you know, these ideas are out there.
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”.
"Triple coat" is nice. I like it!
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.
Naval has said most books could be essays and most essays could be tweets
What could tweets be?
emoji
Insert lazy joke about how the whole of Xitter could be condensed into a single poo emoji.
EDIT : Something related but slightly less wasteful of your time :
Carmen by Stromae :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU
</joke>
.
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.
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.
“7 habits…” made an empire from 7 common-sense things in a book form :)
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.
Sean:
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
I was hoping that ebooks, print on demand, self-publishing and such would lead to a new age of pamphleteering. But it didn't happen like that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you think it is not possible?
Of course it is hard work to distill something complex, but I have some naive intuition that it would actually be possible.
I think you misunderstood the comment.
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.
Less true nowadays since the headlines are made for attention grabbing and bear no relationship with the content.
Business books (and self-help books) had been ChatGPTing before ChatGPT was invented.
How to win friends and influence people remains one of the better ones. Most of its chapters are only a handful of pages.
That is not a business book
Yes it is, almost all of the examples in the book are about business situations!
What is a business book? For example I’ve seen “The Art of War” listed as business book.
I recommend giving it a read, it is clearly a business book.
You often need to explain the same idea from different perspectives because you don't know your audience.
I’d say most books period, not just business books - could be shortened to just a couple of pages.
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.
“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.
Because nobody bought the one page for $29.95 at the airport in days people still bought paper books.
I believe that almost every single thing you read has some worthwhile knowledge or wisdom, as well as a slew of material that is wrong or irrelevant or based on values that I don't carry. This includes books, blog posts, and sometimes even short form social media posts.
The key is to read with an open mind BUT don't blindly take everything as gospel. Ask yourself "is this surprising?", or "is this new?" and filter it through the "does this apply to me now?" or "is the person who is saying this worth listening to?".
Throwing out any entire book is shortsighted. Even "bad" books have nuggets of wisdom or new ideas or concepts. Not everything applies to your situation. Some things might apply now. Some things might apply at some point in the future, and having read the book you have an arsenal ready to be deployed when the time comes. Some things will never apply.
If I read a book and have one new original perspective or "aha" moment, it's a net positive.
This is true, nearly every book has at least some useful or insightful bits, but our time is limited. If you're reading one book that's mostly uninteresting, you're also not reading all the other books that you could be reading instead. Now I'm not advocating for minmaxing your life down to the point of insanity, but I do think it's sensible to try and pick up good books over bad books — whatever that means to you.
That's an excellent point.
The last part is most important: whatever that means to you.
I've read books that I thought were great at presenting some key concept. Other people would disagree. The key thing is that different people perceive and absorb information in different ways, no one book will appeal to everyone.
Sorry to be blunt, but this is not a good take at all, because of one simple fact; time is limited.
What you’re saying basically translates to “read everything”.
Time is limited. But I am not saying "read everything."
I'm saying "read".
If they happen to pick the books from that list, they won't walk away empty-handed. They will learn something. These books happen to be popular, and they are not worthless. They are written in an approachable style that might be more easily digestible than the other books the author recommends. He said that himself -- the books he recommends are not easy reading.
If someone decide to not read these books because of this article, but does not read others about similar topics either, they lose out.
The title says that "business books are entertainment" which on the surface makes it seem like the whole category does not have value. By extension you can extrapolate that reading about business in books is JUST entertainment, hence has no merit value.
I'm not familiar with the books the author recommends, but they made it to my reading list. I think that I might be less entertained by them than the ones he critiques, but I'm sure that they contain some good lessons as well.
Where did you get “read everything” from?
Isn’t it just “read”?
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.
"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.
this is true for pretty much anything in life honestly
Most popular nonfiction is entertainment. When I realized this I went back to reading fiction. The quality of entertainment is so much better!
> Skips the part that Peter Thiel was already in the top 1% of the population—Stanford-educated, ex-Credit Suisse, and founder of a small capital firm—before PayPal. He wasn’t a struggling outsider with nothing to lose. His advice is filtered through a lens of early privilege and structural advantage.
> The book wraps fatalism in edgy language and markets it as practical wisdom
First the author embraces fatalism, then criticizes fatalism. I guess only one kind is fashionable
And nowhere does zero to one claim to be a book for the every-man. If you’re serious about start ups you probably have job and educational options.
In fact, the book talks about Theil’s experience of almost becoming a Supreme Court clerk.
This article is more reductive and off the mark than the content it wants to criticize.
True. He didn't get everything right, but at least it's not 300 pages long ;)
Any essay from that book is more concise and more insightful than this substack. The only reason people are commenting is to share their dislike of some business book they read - that’s why nobody is quoting the actual article.
Apple is actually a great example of the MVP concept working. The original iPhone had no front camera, a crappy back camera, a low quality screen, no App Store, and no copy/paste. What it had was a great “feel” and it was intuitive to use. They released it, gathered feedback, and iterated.
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.
0: http://businessbooksandco.com
1: https://pnc.st/s/business-books/e9076f47/doom-guy-with-john-...
I'm skeptical of overly empirical arguments. It's a lot easier to fool someone by citing some unreproducible study or misinterpreted statistic. Tell me a story and I understand it's one story but it might have some kind of meaning or resonance.
The best thing I learn from business book and bios is that it can be done. The people are often very human and flawed. Half of it is just believing you can do it and working hard.
If you look at empirical data you quickly come across efficient market and no free lunch. But it's important to note you are not a statistic and what you do determines your fate. Or at least that's the most productive way to go through life
This kind of underscores the author's point, though. These books in question give the impression that they supply concrete business advice, but much of it is highly non-transferrable. Or at least requires significant discipline to separate the concrete from the self-aggrandization, survivor bias, confirmation bias, etc. They don't get at the heart of the technical, social and political challenges facing an average Joe starting a company. Sure, their journey may inspire you to get moving, but so could Frodos. This doesn't make them a bad book, but they are not scholarly. Realistically, since Frodos story based on a much broader familiarity with human history, it may be significantly more cross-applicable despite being set in fantasy world.
My comment was probably something similar. Are there some general principles? Sure. And I'm glad that Harvard Business School professors, consultants, and successful execs (or their ghostwriters) can elaborate on them as food for thought especially when backed with some data. But I've also heard/read seemingly super-logical cases for various outcomes that ended up simply not happening.
Quite a few pop-non-fic books, especially business, self-help (tons of overlap in form and technique there), and both business and non-business (these latter usually get adopted by the business-side anyway) “big idea” books, not only cite studies of dubious value, but cite sources that don’t include their claim at all, or contradict it.
Yes agree! They are really bad, superficial, one-idea-books. These are those the author highlights.
He himself gives a list of good books to read at the end of the article. So I think the title is a nice click bait.
I enjoy “business fables” like The Goal or The Phoenix Project. Since you must know a fair chunk of the business books - any other good ones in this genre?
I think you're referring to novels that have strong business themes? Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding. That's an interesting sub-genre that we have not yet explored on the show but have discussed doing in the future. In the six years of the show, we have done exclusively non-fiction and I read myself mostly non-fiction. Sorry, therefore no recommendations yet! I'll checkout the ones you mentioned.
DevOps is one of the weird ones because the details are so situational. No one likes to emphatically throw communications between Dev and Ops (and security) under the train. But the reality is that, for large organizations, making it so that different functions don't have to communicate is often the best approach.
I have yet to see DevOps actually executed well. IME, it always winds up with half-assed infrastructure, because devs often have little interest in ops, and even more rarely have any kind of background in it.
The entire concept seems to me like devs noticed that ops folks were often automating large portions of their jobs with shell scripts, and haughtily thought, “we could do so much better with proper tooling and a better language,” completely disregarding the fact that the ops team had decades of combined experience and trauma from past incidents.
Don't really disagree.
I sort of lost interest in a lot of the DevOps culture.
I think when Kubernetes came in for larger orgs (and even before such as OpenShift that I was involved with), the set infra up and get out of the way mindset made a lot of sense. I think there was an attempt to overlay DevOps on what would become Platform Engineering but I'm not sure it ever really made sense.
Content like this has to choose the point they're targeting on a rigorous-education-to-entertaining spectrum.
Chess teaching content that's only for people at ~2300 ELO on how to get from there to 2400 ELO? Potential audience of perhaps 10,000 people worldwide.
Chess-themed entertainment content, with educational content mixed with lots of jokes and memes, accessible to players at all levels? Potential audience of 10,000,000 people.
Likewise, you don't become a bestselling business author if your book on how to be a Fortune 500 CEO only has an audience of 500 people. If your book succeeds, 99.95% of your sales will come from people who don't ever plan or expect to become a Fortune 500 CEO.
It's interesting you use that analogy because my dad was an author of chess books. Yes, many were a niche within a niche and only sold a few thousands copies.
My observations about business books match your intuition—the more popular business books tend to be popular for reasons beyond their educational content. They usually include great storytelling, are meticulously crafted and edited, and are about societally interesting subject matter beyond the pure educational aspects.
But that really makes a difference in your experience as a reader. I'm not saying popular means good. I am saying that on average with all things considered the popular business books tend to be better experiences to read than the unpopular ones. Of course there are exceptions.
One difference is that the chess content you talk about does have educational value - it will make you better chess player although in time ineffective way.
> So, in some sense the author here is doing the same kind of over-generalization that many of the books do.
I read most of the main books in the "ideation/innovation/startup/scale-up/ entrepreneurship/business plan writing" available at a certain time, and had to sift through a lot of useless or redundant material to extract very little wisdom from it. (Of course what is really useful emerges only when you then execute your own start-up idea later.)
The grandparent post cautions from "overgeneralization", so let me add a comment in the opposite direction, namely "undergeneralization": it is not only business books that are more for entertainment (and perhaps reflection) than hard facts; even the category of formal economics/business studies academic literature includes large quantities of claims that do not hold, were not properly assessed, hold no predictive power etc.
I recommend one that positively stands out, Philip E. Tetlock and his studies on forecasting abilities of so-called "experts" versus average person in the street: he wrote several critical studies that found academics (economists/business in particular, hence relevant for this post) and other experts to be lacking, and then developed a methodology for more systematic prediction (e.g. see the book Superforecasting: The Science of Prediction (2016, with Ben Gardner, https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Science-Prediction-P...).
What did he predict?
Even the reputable books tend to resort to anecdotal evidence and do not evaluate any of their claims. I'd go crazy if I had to read 100 of them but the ones I read were based on 100% survivorship bias and 0% scientific studies.
Personally, it seems to me that general business books --- that is, the ones that aren't textbooks (accounting, microeconomics, etc.) --- are merely a sub-genre of the self-help category and that these books may provide value by giving some motivation and inspiration at best and, at worst, provide huge disvalue by misinforming.
If you’re that keen on business books, I have one that you might enjoy: https://www.sallery.co.uk/lessons. I’ve tried to avoid some of the pitfalls listed in the article, but feedback from someone with broad knowledge of the genre would be most welcome!
just quickly your website doesn't have https so it says that the site I'm going is insecure:
> Secure Site Not Available
> You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of businessbooksandco.com is not available.
I was legit taken back for a second wondering what I just clicked on
But cheers, I just realised how far we've come if yours was the first site in years? that I've seen this on
You're right. I know! It's our podcast host, Pinecast. They don't provide HTTPS to customers for the website. Luckily very few people find us through the website. The vast majority are followers on Spotify. Thanks for the feedback.
So WoodenChair (fun username!), from your perspective, what books would you recommend that actually has some value in business?
"Business" is so broad it's hard to give you recommendations without knowing what you're looking for. That's kind of the point of my post. But as one example, as I mentioned in my post, I loved Doom Guy. If you're building a business in the video game industry you should definitely check it out.
I would also recommend all of the other books in my post that I mentioned by different sub-genres (Shoe Dog, Radical Candor, etc.).
Thanks! I just was curious about a broad selection.
My personal recommendation is and remains "E-Myth".
These blogs and these kind of comments are why I keep coming back to this site.
Thanks!
Agree - but The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt) is a rare exception to this. It’s written as a novel but actually contains valuable and counterintuitive lessons about optimizing for efficiency in a complex delivery process. Worth every page
> These aren’t easy reads. > They require real cognitive effort. > But they offer lasting value.
Here we go, that's the real problem today, the lack of focus and not being able anymore to invest cognitive effort in long lasting things. Everything was turning into a short/reel/tiktok already, add llms for quick answers to the formula and that's a perfect recipe for disaster
> add llms for quick answers to the formula and that's a perfect recipe for disaster
I understand some books are worth their weight in gold. The real worry is, now that LLMs can "deep search" & present larger reports, some of which I read religiously without gaining much for the time invested, I find myself preferring shorter answers.
That is, the feedback mechanism (of larger LLM output being too verbose than being too substantive) is reinforcing rewards for shorter and shorter text spans.
Then when I switch to reading long form articles, long instructional/educational videos, or book chapters, I have caught myself running out of patience and reaching for summarisation by LLMs (sometimes, when I've bothered to check the original source, LLMs have thoroughly misinterpreted or skipped key thesis/points... Kind of the reverse "miss the forest for the trees").
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.
Most books published aren’t worth the readers time. After 30 years, there’s been some distillation, and the ones still in popular culture are higher quality.
You have deeper discussions about older books because the median surviving older book is more worthy of discussion than the median new book.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with books in general and articles is that they always refer some more books to read or go indepth so it has caused me to move even far away from taking action- even the best/top 10 books is not the final list as they themselves refer another 20-50 books so i feel like its never ending cycle of slippery slope. I have completely given up on reading books and occassionaly chatgpt the problems i am currently faciing and go from there rather than ever reading a single book or article.
> Read no business books. Read Sun Tzu and Thucydides. They were contemporaries a world apart from one another and 25 centuries apart from us, yet no modern quarrel nor accomplishment escapes their analysis.
Tim Sweeney https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1610103077599674368
Tim Sweeney has just won one of the rounds in his own version of the Peloponnesian war. I ended up listening to Kenneth W. Harl's "Great Courses" lecture series on The Peloponnesian War and it was mind blowing. One of the best lecture series I've ever listened to.
There's another, similar genre of non-fiction books: Sapiens, Outliers etc. I notice these tend to be unusually popular with people who have too short an attention span to absorb knowledge rigorously (e.g. high net-worth individuals), and would rather prefer it be weaved into a narrative, even at the cost of some accuracy. Bonus if the narrative confirms their preconceived notions. For a while, I myself was guilty of consuming both these and business books. I still occasionally read them, but now I recognise them as entertainment and am under no illusion about rigour or practical application.
> I notice these tend to be unusually popular with people who have too short an attention span to absorb knowledge rigorously
Airport literature.
Those books switch reader's nob one click up, so they become 1% more informed than the average who haven't read the same content (yet). That 1% looks/sounds incredibly a lot more. "OMG, he said neanderthals and homo-sapiens coexisted somewhere in time. What a genius!". This kind of reaction.
Damn, you could have cribbed this list from my own notes on various business/startup books over the years.
I like the idea that business books have an emotional appeal. I think it comes from buying the book itself. The more famous a book is, the more people will feel good about reading it, no matter how little it practically benefits them. I think there's a related psychological effect where luxury items sometimes sell more when their price increases.
I think that most business books hyperfocus on one or a few simplified "rules" (hell, Ray Dalio's book is literally called "Principles") and ignore any messy complications or cofactors. If you really want a laugh, read Smart's "Topgrading" which spends an entire half a book telling you that later chapters are going to really improve your hiring process, and the second half of the book repeating some simple rules without bothering to defend them against obvious objections. "Punished by Rewards" makes a simple case and then burns through the remainder of the pages dissing Skinner. "Built to Last" is a collection of anecdotes about business that make bold and authoritative statements that are still up for debate (such as where exactly Hewlett Packard went wrong). "Blitzscaling" hangs its entire thesis on the success of the Sambear brothers, which seems ridiculous to me.
The best book on this subject I've read is Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. The entire premise is backward. You don't just look at success to find the source of success with out introducing a massive amount of survivorship biases.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176225/fooled-by-ra...
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.
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.
Read to the end ... he mentioned four examples of good books.
It’s very poorly written then. It has a clickbait title and uses content that is easily dismissed before getting to the point.
No.
One thing that’s common in most business and productivity books is that they use an awful lot of words to say things that either don’t mean much or aren’t really replicable. Ton of nonfiction books suffer from the same issue and could easily just be a blog post.
I still read them now and then because I figure it’s better to read Mark Manson than scroll through TikTok or get sucked into some other Gen Z brainrot.
1. Quality and information-density vary widely. The author of the post lists some of the least useful (but popular) business books, but there are better ones. The benchmark for me is does the book contains specific, actionable recommendations I can use to bootstrap how I do something I don't already know how to do well and want to get started. If it doesn't it really is just fluff.
2. Even if these books are not that rich in applicable advice, if you read the book and reflect on it and maybe 1% of it is relevant to you and results in some new ideas, is it not worth it?
3. All of these business books now have alternative, compressed representations on YouTube, podcasts, and blogs. Asking a chatbot to review a few of those and produce a summary is often more efficient than reading the book itself. Usually these books have enough content worth for a 3 pages long summary, not for an entire book. And of course you can also listen to an interview with the author or a review from a trustworthy critic, or watch a video.
I strongly dislike business books. Not because I'm disinterested in the topic or dislike the author, but because I'm put off by the presentation as having come up with some new magic formula (I did X and was successful, so all you need to do is X and you'll be successful too), when in fact 90% (95%? 99%?) of the time their success is due to a combination of luck, timing, common sense and perseverance (aka survivorship bias).
I think my repulsion for these books also stems from how we attribute almost mythical status to some of these celebrity business leaders (i.e., Steve Jobs), to where when they do something that any reasonable and not-an-asshole person would do ("he said hello to me in the elevator!", "he wrote me a nice email!") we laud them with praise in amazement.
I do admire what these people have accomplished, but the hero-worship is so off-putting that I have a hard time hearing the message.
I'm not opposed to business books. It's true that most of them are in narrative form and try to extract anecdotal lessons into broad strategy, but I've found them useful for framing my own thinking about teams, strategy, and leadership. Thinking about your work, just in a different way, or though a different lens, I believe is helpful. How helpful? Probably not as much as making more decisions yourself, but at least in my environment I'm rate limited by circumstances beyond my control!
That said, there are a couple of "good" business books, and I agree with the author on the works of Michael Porter (esp. On Competition) and ET Jaynes, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. The later was a major influence on my life and pivotal book I read as a young scientist, and it moved me into the direction of data science!
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.
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
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.
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.
> except that half the people saying it are misusing the term because they didn’t read the 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?
Black Swan is one of those books that has definitely stuck with me even though it's been ~15 years since I read it.
But I would consider it philosophy, not a "business book".
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)
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.
Tried to read antifragile but his writing came off as too egotistic for me to take seriously at the time
I also came to mention E-myth Revisited since its goal is to dissuade rather than promote. Same vibe as https://sive.rs/a
The E-myth is good. It convinced me I do not want to run a business.
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
There’s one business book I’ve actually enjoyed reading and somehow learned more from years after reading it than while reading it: Business Adventures.
It’s a bit silly, doesn’t pretend to be a guide, provide any wise advice of any sort, and certainly not to have the one grandiose radical new idea that will solve all your problems™.
But perhaps that’s why it works so well.
I read so many business books, and they are hard to get rid of after you have amassed a large collection of several hundred. On reflection, many seem like crap, or maybe a good few points what could be summarized in a few pages but somehow turned into a long book. I'm still glad I read them, and the jewels have always made it worth the adventure. I really like looking back at the discredited books I've read and in hindsight, asked myself how I was fooled at the time in not detecting the the weaknesses in the books. It has always been a point of reflection to improve these detection skills when reading new material. For me, at the time of reading, the books: "In Search of Excellence" and "Think and Grow Rich" seemed great, but in hindsight, "What was I thinking".
I’m glad Peter Thiel was brought up because he keeps coming up as this Bond villain type of dude when really he was just lucky twice with investments in PayPal and Facebook.
After those payouts plus a bunch of time in the markets, a huge chunk of his net worth is basically just those two jackpots plus not a whole lot more gains than throwing the proceeds into some index funds, maybe just something more aggressive than that because he got to work with enough money where it can be risked more than the average person’s 401k.
My submission to the world is that Peter Thiel is a really average dude in terms of talent and Palantir is more like a boring government contractor with mediocre but specialized software versus the Bond villain spy agency we all take it to be.
In my experience, I find that business books often lean more toward entertainment than providing actual strategic tools. While they can be a great source of inspiration and motivation, they don’t always offer the practical, data-driven strategies that you can directly apply to your business. I appreciate the stories and insights they provide, but I believe that true strategy comes from real-world experience, experimentation, and adapting to the unique needs of your business.
Reading business books can certainly help me think differently or spark new ideas, but for actionable strategies, I usually rely more on hands-on experience, mentorship, and tools that are specifically tailored to my industry. There’s a time for inspiration, but when it comes to building something sustainable, it takes more than just theory.
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.
Business books are like courses, master classes, etc.
It’s just a way to make you feel better because you read something, and now you think you know how it works, but you don’t, so end up reading more and more of them.
There should be a balance between reading and doing, i.e. consumption and production.
I agree with the principle. Most books in the case study section fall into what I’d call the “self-help-business” category. They’re comforting reads, especially when work isn’t going well. You don’t necessarily turn to them for strategy, but for a boost of optimism or a mental reset, with a dash of hope.
For strategy and execution, I look to Harvard Business Review. Its detailed case studies, frameworks, and exercises address the operational complexities that don’t translate well to mass-market books, which often skip them. They’re dry and time-intensive, but invaluable when you're looking to build real strategic and operational skills.
I'm halfway through Feld and Mendelson's Venture Deals and earlier this year worked through Ittelson's Financial Statements.
Having cofounded a startup that raised investor money before, I can state confidently that both are going to make me better at what I do next time I start something.
Of course, they're not books about "what to do", just "how people do the basics". Which is harder because there's less ambiguity to hide behind. Sometimes my eyes glaze and I need to put them down and wait for a time when I have more energy.
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.
One of the big problems in my experience is that strategies are often both interesting and useful. But the real results are very situational and depend on boots on the ground. I won't single out anyone in particular but I've definitely seen very sensible-seeming frameworks and approaches (which are hard to really argue with in the general case) that led to analyses that empirically turned out to be totally wrong for individual situations.
The only business book I’ve read is that one about management by the CEO of Intel (I forget the name). It helped me a lot with my first big corporate client because until then I had only worked at startups and small businesses. I literally didn’t understand what the purpose of meetings was, etc. Anyway, I haven’t been compelled to pick up any other business books as most of the popular ones seem like self/help books.
When ever I read an article like this, claming one perspective and interpretation of content. I always remember that everyone has different minds and different ways they make connections between concepts and understanding in their brains. Thats why we don't have a single narrative on how to create understanding of any concept. It's quite sad, I feel sad for the author for his lack of intelectual discovery.
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.
Reading a lot isn’t just about storing and recalling information—it’s also about shaping the way you think.
The same goes for education. If I measured the value of my university years solely by the information I can still recall, I’d consider them rather inefficient. But the real value lay in learning how to learn and how to think through complex problems.
I agree with you, however, there is a difference between being well-ready and widely-read. I think one who can recite the essence of a handful of books has more much to say than someone who can list 50 books they read last year.
True, but books are also valuable for the subtle ways in which they change you, not just for what you remember.
You can say the same about movies and documentaries. Why is a book any different?
Yes, books have the power to change you but like anything you have to put in the time to study it and put it into practice. Reading a ton of them and hoping they will change you by osmosis does nothing more than keep your mind busy.
this is me with media in general i cant remember much of anything i consume
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”
This is very similar to the ”boundary condition” for the scientific method and the craziness of ”teaching business” in schools. I wrote my thoughts too about this at some point: https://sentience.lostbookofsales.com/essays/scientific-meth...
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.
I'm glad someone said it. The same goes for my overpriced MBA.
It's all Monday-morning quarterbacking, and has very little on-the-job practicality, even less as years pass, and technology (and politics) evolve.
It's not that all business books are worthless, but the article nails how so many are written more to inspire than to inform. They often flatten complex stories into digestible slogans, which can feel empowering in the moment but rarely translate into meaningful action.
I thought "Personal Interlude: Lessons From My Quant Trenches" was just another business book title ready to be criticized. I wondered why the formatting was different on this one, then I slowly realized it wasn’t a business book title at all.
I hate business books with fluff in them. I’m not here to read your poem.
On that note, my brother sent me a book called “Zero Down” by Roland Frasier. It was 75 pages, and not once did I think, “They should’ve trimmed the fat here.”
That’s how these books should be written.
He forgets to mention that most books that promise to improve you at "something" could have been a great 2 kilobyte forum post.
The business model is similar to Netflix: take a possibly decent idea and expand it to 5 boring seasons.
> In practice, customers buy based on utility and price, not ideology.
That’s not always the case and it varies by sector. A lot of B2B firms may buy that way, but B2C transactions often have emotional or ideological drivers as well.
You can always come up with criticism for anything. Do they deliver some interesting ideas (while understandably they might oversimplify some other aspects) and are not complete frauds? If so there is some value in them.
I've read at-least 4-6 books related to startups, business, habit building etc.. Majority of them could be a blog or few blogs. Sometime I skim through most of the pages to avoid the repetition of the concepts.
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.
Not to mention that the article is written using ChatGPT with run-of-the-mill (although still valid) critique of the works cited.
Yep. This article reads exactly like one shotting ChatGPT. The bullet points are a dead giveaway.
https://chatgpt.com/share/681f1529-2f48-800e-9325-e1adee7521...
Correct: the article has not been written, and therefore, need not be read.
Can anyone share some examples they think are strategic tools? I've read a solid number of these and am genuinely interested.
> Reading "Business" Books Is A Waste Of Time
Yes, but they are significantly less destructive than an MBA.
MBAs are an entertainment degree, not a practical training for real organizations.
I'd say they're a signaling and networking degree.
If business books are just entertainment, then better to read more fiction!
Bottom line: entrepreneurs writing books are trying to make a buck off of readers.
And are often complete fiction. See: In Search of Excellence
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
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.)
Finally, someone putting into words what I have felt intuitively ever since the concept of an "MVP" and the obsession around A/B testing came into vogue. The quotes that most resonated with me:
---
The MVP concept is often overused to justify low-quality products.
Metrics are treated as precise guides without accounting for interpretation or strategy.
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When I entered the startup world, I mistakenly followed the MVP playbook. We launched too early, misread feedback, and ended up iterating around noise. What saved the company wasn’t lean methodology. It was building something so good that users couldn’t ignore it. I’ve hired engineers who were obsessed with quality and passed on candidates with vague “passion.”
I'd extend it to business news.
Thoughts on Hormozi's 100m offers?
Boring and a slog to read. It was a few years back but I don't remember a single interesting take away(I've read hundreds of business books and most I can think of one or two good ideas from). It made me go from someone that thought he was interesting to someone that actively avoids his content.
Most books are junk entertainment, and not what they're, in fact, falsely purported to be. We live in the most insincere period in history thanks to the malign coupling of late stage capitalism and pervasive interconnectedness (smartphones and social media). Everything is simulacra, just an insincere monetization process. Sensationalism is our new God.
> Airbnb didn’t invent a new concept—it executed better within an existing space.
Uhm did it not? If anything it invented two new concepts - paid couch surfing (which it turns out people didn't really want) and unofficial ad-hoc holiday rentals (which people really want).
I'm nitpicking - overall the article is spot on and I'm glad this is getting called out.
Are those new "concepts"? Uber for your house seems all. Effectively every single business in the gig economy has been rehashing the same concept trying to commodify every aspect of the human experience by inserting a platform as an alternative to a regulated market (or no market at all).
Yeah definitely. There was no way you could rent out your house before Airbnb.
Uber for X is a new concept if nobody has done it before. Sure you can say it's obvious but most business ideas are, especially in hindsight. The idea is the easy part.
The main theme is survivorship bias: https://xkcd.com/1827/
There's nothing wrong with telling your story in a book. But telling it as a half truth is just as bad a lying.
Business books and self-help books are for the most part utter garbage and you are possibly going to generate more economic value for your business or your career by reading Vargas Llosa or Tolstoy than by reading all that airport drivel.
The mere concept of a "business book" seems like hamfisted satire. It blows my mind how so many white collar workers genuinely entertain the concept in the first place.
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?!
Pretty cool seeing how folks argue over fluff vs depth in business books - tbh I struggle finishing most of them for this exact reason. you ever hit a book where one small story actually sticks with you way longer than all the big frameworks?
How did this ai written crap get so far up on hacker news.