Business books: Why they are mostly meh and why that doesn't matter

19 May 2019

I read books in fits and starts. I won't read any for months and then I might read 6 or 7 in a few days. I read a fair few "business books" - i.e. books aimed at managers and businesspeople generally. There are over 80,000 books in the "Business & Money" section of Amazon. So there's a lot of them. And, unsurprisingly, most of them are "meh".

What do I mean by "meh". Well most of them are not completely without value. Unless we are talking about the self-published ravings of a lunatic (like, say, this LinkedIn article), a book that goes through a publisher has some kind of quality control process (unless we are talking vanity presses here - which do exist). But most of the advice in them is trite and obvious and most of the writing is pedestrian. It is rare to find a book that is both surprising in content and griping in style. This is, of course deliberate. Most business books are really a version of the self-help genre. You read to pick up a few tips that you might even do but also to feel good about yourself. "Look, I have consumed some media other than Game of Thrones, I am virtuous". So you don't want anything too challenging. Diagrams and tables are good. Summaries at the start and end of each chapter. Lots and lots of case studies, preferably featuring famous companies (which are totally not there to pad the whole thing out). Some action items that you can think really hard about doing and then not do.

Not all business books are like this. Some are written by academics. These tend to use dense jargon and are aimed at other academics and luckless students on courses. Reading these books is like peeling a kng prawn. You eventually get to the good stuff but you'll probably harm yourself in the process and then be left with a pile of unpleasant refuse.

Sometimes an academic will write a popular business book. Either this academic will have had some serious ghost writer help or they will have spent a few years writing columns in the business press where exasperated sub-editors will have beaten them and their prose into some semblence of legibility.

Otherwise business books are written by consultants and those seeking consulting careers. They might be former executives who have worked at famous companies and now want to spin that off. More frequently they are consultants trying to sell something. Books will rarely be a standalone thing. There will be presentations at conferences and $1000 a day masterclasses and all that jazz. The book is both a cornerstone and a fig-leaf to these other activities. It also gives the whole enterprise an aura of intellectual respectability. He ain't not fly-by-night snake oil salesman, he's got a book, man!

Now here comes the dirty secret of business book publishing. No one reads these books. Well, that's not completely true but it is to a first approximation. Who has time to read a book these days? Once I got unexpectedly parachuted into the role of sales operations manager. There are thousands of books written about the sexy world of sales but very few written about the more mundane world sales operations. I found a book called "Cracking the Sales Management Code". Every page of this book was solid gold. I shared it with the rest of my team. The response I got was "er, do you have a 10 page article?"

But here's the paradox. People are more likely to read your 10 page article if you have written a book ("he's got a book, man"). They will buy the book and not read it. They will feel better for having bought it and it is that feeling of easy achievement that you as a business book writer are really selling. Writers have gotten wise to this and so most business books read like padded articles (all those case studies). What's the point in writing something that no one will read? All the punters want is a 10 page article - a readymade cliff notes.

If foxhunting is the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable then business book publishing is the unreadable in pursuit of the unteachable. Long may this noble game continue!