Having read hundreds of books over 25 years, here’s what I think about business books:

- 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 there are maybe 5 business books out there. I’m not sure how exactly I’d define the 5 different business books, but I think of you read 10-15 business books you’ve pretty much read them all. After a while, they all start boiling down to the same few points with differences in narrative content. If I were to take an unconsidered stab at a few of them: hard work + luck is about the closest formula anyone has found for success if applied over long time periods; you have to be disagreeable and believe in yourself, but not so disagreeable that you can’t get along with anyone; people are important, and treating them well leads to better businesses (over long time periods); sometimes you get dealt a bad hand.

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.

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.

I believe that almost every single thing you read has some worthwhile knowledge or wisdom, as well as a slew of material that is wrong or irrelevant or based on values that I don't carry. This includes books, blog posts, and sometimes even short form social media posts.

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.

Apple is actually a great example of the MVP concept working. The original iPhone had no front camera, a crappy back camera, a low quality screen, no App Store, and no copy/paste. What it had was a great “feel” and it was intuitive to use. They released it, gathered feedback, and iterated.

I'm halfway through Feld and Mendelson's Venture Deals and earlier this year worked through Ittelson's Financial Statements.

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.

In my experience, I find that business books often lean more toward entertainment than providing actual strategic tools. While they can be a great source of inspiration and motivation, they don’t always offer the practical, data-driven strategies that you can directly apply to your business. I appreciate the stories and insights they provide, but I believe that true strategy comes from real-world experience, experimentation, and adapting to the unique needs of your business.

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.

> These aren’t easy reads. > They require real cognitive effort. > But they offer lasting value.

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

Most popular nonfiction is entertainment. When I realized this I went back to reading fiction. The quality of entertainment is so much better!

It may be a waste of time if you had lived long enough to experience vividly the ins and outs of the business world. Taking an extreme example, senior execs who had "climbed from the bottom" in international companies. These people have seen/lived a lot, so no business book can really impress them or show something they haven't already seen. On the flip side, there is a high number of young people eager to learn how things work in the business world, but they don't want to experience everything, every failure, the ups and downs, they want to cut corners. I think for that kind of people business books can add some value, especially the biographical ones. It doesn't need to be the biography of a CEO (e.g. Jobs'). The life story of a great salesperson can change your mindset forever.

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-...

One of the big problems in my experience is that strategies are often both interesting and useful. But the real results are very situational and depend on boots on the ground. I won't single out anyone in particular but I've definitely seen very sensible-seeming frameworks and approaches (which are hard to really argue with in the general case) that led to analyses that empirically turned out to be totally wrong for individual situations.

"An ounce of practice beats a pound of theory, but a pound of practice needs an ounce of theory."

Valid for any domain for book knowledge vs practical experience.

There is also a strong signaling effect.

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.

> Skips the part that Peter Thiel was already in the top 1% of the population—Stanford-educated, ex-Credit Suisse, and founder of a small capital firm—before PayPal. He wasn’t a struggling outsider with nothing to lose. His advice is filtered through a lens of early privilege and structural advantage.

> 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

1. Quality and information-density vary widely. The author of the post lists some of the least useful (but popular) business books, but there are better ones. The benchmark for me is does the book contains specific, actionable recommendations I can use to bootstrap how I do something I don't already know how to do well and want to get started. If it doesn't it really is just fluff.

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.

Agree - but The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt) is a rare exception to this. It’s written as a novel but actually contains valuable and counterintuitive lessons about optimizing for efficiency in a complex delivery process. Worth every page

Thank you, most of these books are actively harmful, and the lack of intellectual rigor makes them exactly this, entertainment masquerading as education.

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.

> Read no business books. Read Sun Tzu and Thucydides. They were contemporaries a world apart from one another and 25 centuries apart from us, yet no modern quarrel nor accomplishment escapes their analysis.

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.

Business books are like courses, master classes, etc.

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.

> Reading "Business" Books Is A Waste Of Time

Yes, but they are significantly less destructive than an MBA.

Feels like it's the act of meditating on making things better, brought about by reading some unscientific and generally unimportant "framework" that matters more than the framework itself. Business books just force certain people to keep business improvement higher on their awareness. People who can keep that meditation high on their list without the books don't need the books.

I hate business books with fluff in them. I’m not here to read your poem.

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.

It's not that all business books are worthless, but the article nails how so many are written more to inspire than to inform. They often flatten complex stories into digestible slogans, which can feel empowering in the moment but rarely translate into meaningful action.

MBAs are an entertainment degree, not a practical training for real organizations.

There’s one business book I’ve actually enjoyed reading and somehow learned more from years after reading it than while reading it: Business Adventures.

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.

One thing that’s common in most business and productivity books is that they use an awful lot of words to say things that either don’t mean much or aren’t really replicable. Ton of nonfiction books suffer from the same issue and could easily just be a blog post.

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.

> In practice, customers buy based on utility and price, not ideology.

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.

I agree with the principle. Most books in the case study section fall into what I’d call the “self-help-business” category. They’re comforting reads, especially when work isn’t going well. You don’t necessarily turn to them for strategy, but for a boost of optimism or a mental reset, with a dash of hope.

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.

I totally agree with the sentiment. I am pretty skeptical of this sort of broad advice. People who achieve success did so under specific conditions. It is unclear which aspects of their strategy are universal and which were only effective under their conditions. Advice based on a broader survey of examples may be a bit better but we need to be honest about how hard it is to extract meaningful insights from this sort of thing. Even something like the time period you picked your examples from has huge implications for what you are studying.

Pretty cool seeing how folks argue over fluff vs depth in business books - tbh I struggle finishing most of them for this exact reason. you ever hit a book where one small story actually sticks with you way longer than all the big frameworks?

I have the complete opposite take to the person who wrote this article.

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.

There are plenty of great business books out there that aren't pop business books. For every critique listed there's a corresponding book that covers the topic.

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.

While there is certainly a lot of crap out there for business books, especially on sales/marketing and management, there are some core books that are must reads if you want to save 30 years of trial and error.

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’m always hesitant to drag books written in a different era through today’s sensibilities.

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.

He forgets to mention that most books that promise to improve you at "something" could have been a great 2 kilobyte forum post.

The business model is similar to Netflix: take a possibly decent idea and expand it to 5 boring seasons.

You can always come up with criticism for anything. Do they deliver some interesting ideas (while understandably they might oversimplify some other aspects) and are not complete frauds? If so there is some value in them.

Not to mention that the article is written using ChatGPT with run-of-the-mill (although still valid) critique of the works cited.

Most books are read for entertainment. I've known many people who have read tons of books but couldn't remember most of what they've read. Every once in a while, a book sparks some interest but most will be read for entertainment.

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.

This is very similar to the ”boundary condition” for the scientific method and the craziness of ”teaching business” in schools. I wrote my thoughts too about this at some point: https://sentience.lostbookofsales.com/essays/scientific-meth...

You could probably put books like Team Topologies, Accelerate, and The Phoenix Project in the same boat with this list of business entertainment set of books and arguably the DevOps Handbook too

A better title to this would have been “MOST Business Books are Entertainment, Not Strategic Tools.”

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.

I've read at-least 4-6 books related to startups, business, habit building etc.. Majority of them could be a blog or few blogs. Sometime I skim through most of the pages to avoid the repetition of the concepts.

i think of books like

* 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.

Some of the business books that I always keep within easy reach of my desk:

- 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.)

I strongly dislike business books. Not because I'm disinterested in the topic or dislike the author, but because I'm put off by the presentation as having come up with some new magic formula (I did X and was successful, so all you need to do is X and you'll be successful too), when in fact 90% (95%? 99%?) of the time their success is due to a combination of luck, timing, common sense and perseverance (aka survivorship bias).

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.

Having come up through hard sciences, I don’t ever know what to do with these kinds of books. If they were written as memoirs, then that’s a different story. That’s all they usually are, but they’re presented in more of an educational/instructional context, yet are devoid of rigor.

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.

Most books are junk entertainment, and not what they're, in fact, falsely purported to be. We live in the most insincere period in history thanks to the malign coupling of late stage capitalism and pervasive interconnectedness (smartphones and social media). Everything is simulacra, just an insincere monetization process. Sensationalism is our new God.

Can anyone share some examples they think are strategic tools? I've read a solid number of these and am genuinely interested.

> Airbnb didn’t invent a new concept—it executed better within an existing space.

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.

action > over everything

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

I'd extend it to business news.

Thoughts on Hormozi's 100m offers?

The mere concept of a "business book" seems like hamfisted satire. It blows my mind how so many white collar workers genuinely entertain the concept in the first place.

And are often complete fiction. See: In Search of Excellence

Bottom line: entrepreneurs writing books are trying to make a buck off of readers.

The main theme is survivorship bias: https://xkcd.com/1827/

There's nothing wrong with telling your story in a book. But telling it as a half truth is just as bad a lying.

Nuh uh. I got Gary V's new book, Day Trading Attention: How to Actually Build Brand and Sales in the New Social Media World, on my shelf and it is my new bible! The secret has been unlocked and given to me. For just $19.99. Why can't you believe it?! Why can't you just be _happy_ for me, for once?!

How did this ai written crap get so far up on hacker news.