- 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/
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.
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.
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.
huh, hard disagree on this one. In my experience, there is zero correlation between length and insights.
RE4B
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.
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.
- I talked about 3 letters to shareholders
- And talked about the Bible
- I talked about books by Alan Weiss & Derek Sivers
Agreed. everyone's context is different and hence the books are different; even the lesson gained for the same book will be different.
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.
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.
I love people, I just don't care that much about how they think they got where they are.
There is a spicy quote which I resonate with. Something to the effect of tiny minds think about people, bigger minds think about events and galaxy brains think about ideas. When I read, I just really want to get to the ideas. I could not give two shits about people and I barely care about the events.
The thing with (real) stories is they relate facts in a structured and somewhat neutral way (causality). This allows you, the reader, to learn things that are beyond the author's point. Essays, on the other hand, don't allow that as authors can (should) always leave out everything that does not support their point without compromising the text.
Personally I'd like to see more rich people follow the Bill Gates model of giving almost all of it away.
1. You need enough paper to create an object with a noticeable mass that takes time to work all the way through. Too small or short and it doesn't feel worth it. Make it short enough and people could read it in the book store.
2. People are bad at applying a crystalized abstraction in day-to-day life. They are better at learning narratives and fitting the current situation to the closest learned narrative, and then acting out the part of the protagonist. Instead of explaining a statistic or explicit rule of thumb, it would be more effective to give a bunch of examples where someone successfully applies the rule and is rewarded. Those examples can take up many pages.
Reading a 3 minute summary, once, I will easily forget the knowledge. But reading about the idea with different stories and other auxiliary information help me retain the principles much faster.
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
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!
So maybe your idea has a future...
"Focus on value creation. Execution beats ideas. Leadership and culture matter."
Despite constant complaints about the padding in many non-fiction books (not just business) there's clearly a silent majority who feel like "If I'm going to bother, ugh, opening a book then I want it to be as thick as possible".
For that matter, you see a similar dynamic on the fiction side too with novellas and short stories bring far distant in popularity to novels. (Even though those same people have zero issues watching 22 minute TV episodes.)
Then there was the delightful Bluffer's Guides series.
I like shorter novels and short stories myself, especially in SF where ideas matter.
I don't know you but there's a good chance that you're not doing all of those things. There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice. There's a small chance that simply hearing those condensed words will change your behavior.
To change how we think and act we need good stories. This is what books are, including these business books. Good stories that take a simple idea and wrap it in anecdotes, justification, shock value, and entertainment so that they stick in your head and perhaps convince you to act in a certain way, at least sometimes.
> There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice.
I just want to note that I do not agree with the above advice. Tobacco and alcohol in moderation are key parts of a healthy life. Abstention is neurotic and thus unhealthy.
There was some evidence that pointed to some benefits to occasional minimal alcohol consumption, but in more recent years, the scientific opinion is that there are no safe amounts of alcohol consumption.
Alcohol has a side benefit that it generally encourages socializing, and being among people DOES have big health benefits. However, if you can have meaningful relationships and socialize WITHOUT consuming alcohol, that is even better.
I'm willing to bet that me stating that did not convince you in the slightest. However, if you read a book or two, were presented with evidence, written in more elegant prose, there is a bigger chance that you might be willing to start believing it.
Just stating things does very little, and that is why books are valuable.
That is incorrect. For it to be true, a single drink in one’s life would be an unsafe amount — and that is clearly nonsense.
Alcohol and tobacco have positive and negative mental, physical and spiritual effects. Abused, they are terrible. Employed properly, they are key factors in a balanced, pleasant, meaningful and rewarding life — a healthy life.
I do acknowledge that the balance may be much less than folks commonly use. I hope that weekly use of alcohol and tobacco is safe enough, but fear that daily use may not be. I will not accept that yearly use is negative.
But all of those will improve the quality of one’s life, and thus improve one mental health.
So, you know, these ideas are out there.
1. Introduce an insight
2. Tell a story that illustrates it
3. Repeat 8–10 times with mild variations
I sometimes wonder if the length is partly marketing—thicker books feel more valuable on a shelf, and more "serious" for gifting or team reading.
That said, I think what readers actually need is often not more explanation, but implementation structure. A single page of actionable scaffolding might be more impactful than 200 pages of polished narrative.
The reason many business books feel fluffy is that these 15-20 pages of solid content are spread over 300 pages to meet the expectations of readers and booksellers.
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 ;)
EDIT : Something related but slightly less wasteful of your time :
Carmen by Stromae :
> 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.
It's the same for business books. A 30-page book won't sell, but a 250 one is a best seller.
The first set is supposed to be the "good" ones, but a lot of people will add books from the second set there too.
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.
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.
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.
Kindness, democracy, business, performance in sport, scientific method etc.
I don't know one good idea that can't be communicated in a page or less.
Of course it is hard work to distill something complex, but I have some naive intuition that it would actually be possible.
What is seen as window dressing, is often essential tapestry that provides context.
“The Iliad” is basically “Achilles gets insulted and sits out the battle, while everyone else tries to win everlasting glory through bravery until Achilles finally has had enough and kills Hector.” But nobody is going to be reading that summary for 2500 years.
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.
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.
What you’re saying basically translates to “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.
Isn’t it just “read”?
Business books are definitely not a perfect substitute for lived experience or having a mentor, but they have certainly helped me.
Valid for any domain for book knowledge vs practical experience.
> 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
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.
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-...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...).
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.
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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
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!
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
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.
You have deeper discussions about older books because the median surviving older book is more worthy of discussion than the median new book.
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.
Preaching to the choir is still practice, and the choir learns new ways to say the same thing. It’s not completely useless.
Airport literature.
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.
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.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176225/fooled-by-ra...
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!
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 hope people don't expect to get an MBA's worth of content from a single book. Business is a subject that can be taught in schools or learned through self-study - either requires time and dedication. Whichever method you choose, you'll still need real-world experience to master it.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners) 2. Competitive Strategy 3. Discipline of Market Leaders 4. Good to Great 5. Built to Last
I highly recommend Buffett's letters to shareholders https://a.co/d/cc1ufM4 and Goldratt's "The Goal" https://a.co/d/iJjTf1y and Taleb's "Antifragile" https://a.co/d/4bjC74J . Aside from his mathematical treatment's of uncertainty (which are free), I wouldn't recommend any of Teleb's other books.
"Let My People Go Surfing" https://a.co/d/2hq7ngp doesn't work for all business, but I really found it personally inspirational.
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?
But I would consider it philosophy, not a "business book".
- the goal
- 5 dysfunctions of a team
- the first 90 days
A friend swears by:
- atomic habits
- seven habits of highly effective people
(Slightly different genre but quite close)
I disagree on "Seven Habits" as its model of "effectiveness" is only applicable to (for lack of a better term) extroverted vocations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reven that being said, there could be value in those ‘repeat’ books inasmuch as one framing/telling may resonate with some more than others and get the message through, even if same message through multiple books.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
The business model is similar to Netflix: take a possibly decent idea and expand it to 5 boring seasons.
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.
https://chatgpt.com/share/681f1529-2f48-800e-9325-e1adee7521...
Yes, but they are significantly less destructive than an MBA.
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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.”
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
- 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.)
It's all Monday-morning quarterbacking, and has very little on-the-job practicality, even less as years pass, and technology (and politics) evolve.
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.
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.
There's nothing wrong with telling your story in a book. But telling it as a half truth is just as bad a lying.
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.