There are 2 types of business books, the pop culture, high-level, feel good business book, and books with real data and case studies by scholars. Both are equally bad for most readers. Let’s start with what Rob Walling has to say about the former:

“…these books are a series of anecdotes disguised as science.”

Amen brother! As someone who is in business, but is also educated in science and logical thinking, these Seth Godin / Malcolm Gladwell / Chris Anderson / Clay Shirky books make me very squeamish. Their lack of scientific rigor is both fundamental to their popularity and their fatal weakness. I love them, but it’s a guilty pleasure.

“The amount of actual information garnered from this kind of book can be summarized in a page or two of written text.”

They are a dinner of ice cream sandwhiches and popcorn. A couple bites are OK, but reading 150, 250 or 350 pages of these books is an incredible waste of time. There is such repetitiveness and rambling drivel in these things to get them to the publisher’s desired page count that it’s a crime against their busy audience’s time.

It seems like the antidote then should be serious business books from academics at respected business schools. Not so fast:

“… these books are great … if you’re Sony. Or Proctor and Gamble. Or Panasonic …. This information would be helpful if I needed to generate a huge business plan to impress a business-school professor …. They speak to markets and business opportunities measured with 8 zeros or more. Massive markets that you don’t need to understand to run a software company.”

I’ve found the same to be true of these books. Are they interesting? Yes, very. Helpful? No, not really.

I’ve only been at a company big enough to apply these types of theories once in my life, and even then I was not high up enough at IBM to put anything I was reading into practice. Working at the individual product or product group level at a company like IBM resembles a startup more than you’d think. It’s just a startup that’s got one hand and one foot tied behind its back in a not unreasonable effort not to be sued for the billions in cash they have.

The lure is strong. Resisting is hard. I succumb myself too often. But do keep up the good fight and try not to read these things.