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593 points ZeroTalent | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.231s | source
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WoodenChair ◴[] No.43943001[source]
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-...

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ikt ◴[] No.43945428[source]
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

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1. WoodenChair ◴[] No.43947468[source]
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.