None of the books the books where are business books.
Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
21–28 of 28 posts
Re: Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
#22I had an entrepreneurship class at school. The teacher was an absolute fan of this kind of books and would assign them as mandatory reading. As I could not help but find most of it intellectually insulting (sorry to be so blunt), I decided to give it a positive twist and review them as products themselves rather than as useful content. I wrote about how the book identified popular wishes like financial success and ap…
You tried to move his cheese!
Re: Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
#23I had an entrepreneurship class at school. The teacher was an absolute fan of this kind of books and would assign them as mandatory reading. As I could not help but find most of it intellectually insulting (sorry to be so blunt), I decided to give it a positive twist and review them as products themselves rather than as useful content. I wrote about how the book identified popular wishes like financial success and ap…
Absolutely beautiful, I wish I could see his face!
Re: Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
#24These books are all either written by ghost authors, or journalists given such privileged access to the source material, that they feel a debt to the subjects. I read them, but do so with a bullshit-filter on. They become far more useful with a critical eye. For example, in "The Founders - story of PayPal" the author fawns over how great one of the Founders at PayPal was at SQL. The Founder would often jump in and fi…
> You can read every business book with this filter, and you get much more out of them for it.
I agree with everything you wrote up until this sentence. My takeaway was that there is nearly nothing to get out of them so I stopped reading them. With the filter on that you describe what do you ultimately get out of reading them?
Re: Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
#25I think he's missing a ton from these books, and that it is a form of entertainment. Should I be listening to something else on a long commute? Even if these are anecdotal, you can start to recognize patterns. I run into situations where I've been able to leverage how someone else got out of this jam in a "business" book I read.
Re: Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
#26The authors need to compete against other books. Book sale targets means it has to appeal to anyone vaguely business-y in the airport book shop. That plus shorter attention spans in general plus need to cater to a wide audience forces the authors to market it on a "One trick doctors hate" level magic fixes. They of course fail to deliver on that, but don't think that makes them entirely a waste of time. As article au…
I don't think Liars Poker is a business book in the sense that this author means. These books are supposed to impart specific, practical insights that you can apply to your own work. Lewis in his books just wants to tell a story that will entertain and be interesting to a general audience.
Re: Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
#27This is true in general. The article starts with a prime example that's plagiarized from Sun Tsu, Which has been the template for dozens to hundreds of ghostwritten "business" books meant to polish the reputation of the name on the cover. Every now and then you encounter someone who's too busy for bullshit. Jeff Bussgang teaches a startup course at HBS and is general partner at Flybridge. His recent book The Experime…
> No self aggrandizement. A distinct lack of the personal pronoun "I." The example scenarios in the book are not cherry picked outliers meant to make a CEO or investor look good. That's remarkable, but brings up the question of then what's the intention / meaning/ why does the book exist? I guess some authors just can afford to publish whatever they want indeed
I haven't taken Bussgang's course, so I'm partly guessing here. But I did volunteer to help at a incubator workshop he was running several years ago at HBS. My impression is that the material for the book comes from his course, from his experience mentoring startup teams, and from experiences with Flybridge's portfolio.
If you are looking for a checklist of how to do a 2025 start up right, this is the book. I listened to the audiobook so I don't know the page count, but the editing is super tight.
Re: Reading "Business" Books Is a Waste of Time
#28The authors need to compete against other books. Book sale targets means it has to appeal to anyone vaguely business-y in the airport book shop. That plus shorter attention spans in general plus need to cater to a wide audience forces the authors to market it on a "One trick doctors hate" level magic fixes. They of course fail to deliver on that, but don't think that makes them entirely a waste of time. As article au…
I love Michael Lewis’ writing style! I have probably read half of the books in this blog article and can remember hardly any of them, but I could still summarize Flash Boys because it was such a cool story.
There is a new one by Gary Stevenson that has a very similar vibe to liars poker fyi. London not New York and FX not bonds