Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools

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.

don't forget the smartest guys in the room

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.

Thank you so much for this list composition.

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.

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 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".

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.

Bethany McLean is great. I also enjoyed "All The Devils Are Here"

I’d like to add Never Lost Again, which is the story of the team that eventually built Google Maps

Ideas mean nothing unless they link to meat space