Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools

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.

Naval has said most books could be essays and most essays could be tweets

I’d say most books period, not just business books - could be shortened to just a couple of pages.

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.

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.

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.

“7 habits…” made an empire from 7 common-sense things in a book form :)

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

How to win friends and influence people remains one of the better ones. Most of its chapters are only a handful of pages.

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

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.

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.

Most books rehash the same ideas so you could compress it in a much shorter one

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.)

Less true nowadays since the headlines are made for attention grabbing and bear no relationship with the content.

You often need to explain the same idea from different perspectives because you don't know your audience.

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.

That is not a business book

What is a business book? For example I’ve seen “The Art of War” listed as business book.

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

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.

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.

What could tweets be?

It reminds me of the Tao Te Ching of Laozi... and Jesus' parables in the New Testament.

So maybe your idea has a future...

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.

Yes it is, almost all of the examples in the book are about business situations!

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.

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.

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.

“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 feel the exact opposite. Slogging through all irrelevant filler in those books dilutes everything, and makes me impatient and unfocused, just fast-forwarding through.

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.

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.

Business books (and self-help books) had been ChatGPTing before ChatGPT was invented.

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!

Because nobody bought the one page for $29.95 at the airport in days people still bought paper books.

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.

Here you go:

"Focus on value creation. Execution beats ideas. Leadership and culture matter."

I think you misunderstood the comment.

Length is 100% marketing. There is no commercial market for 15-20 page essays, which would be the ideal length for a lot of business books. (The famous Harvard Business Review cases are typically this long.)

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.

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.

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Extreme! but a calendar with one of these a day plus a paragraph to explain would be pretty good.

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.

Don't we already have linkedin for those condensed ideas?

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

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 ;)

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You forgot the first 2 chapters whose purpose is to lay out with anecdotes how everybody does it wrong because they don't follow that one insight and argue that anyone who criticizes the book has the wrong mindset for being a successful entrepreneur.

> 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.

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”.

The same formula seems to be common to all the "popular X" genres (science, psychology, etc), and has been for years. The Selfish Gene followed it. So do Malcolm Gladwell's books - the last one of his I read, I had to restrain myself from throwing at the nearest wall in frustration at his nonsense.

</joke>

"Triple coat" is nice. I like it!

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.

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.

You are the first person I have ever seen argue that tobacco in moderation is healthy. Quite the claim.

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 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)

You'll get a 60 pages book, not a 1000 pages one.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

That's what "The Personal MBA" book did

I recommend giving it a read, it is clearly a business book.

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.

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.

> 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.