Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools

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-...

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?

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!

These blogs and these kind of comments are why I keep coming back to this site.

Thanks!

So WoodenChair (fun username!), from your perspective, what books would you recommend that actually has some value in business?

My personal recommendation is and remains "E-Myth".

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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.

Thanks! I just was curious about a broad selection.