"Business" Books Are Cheap Entertainment, Not Strategic Tools
Most popular business books are written for emotional appeal, not intellectual rigor.
They turn simplified stories into generic advice, convert rare successes into universal strategies, and replace complex market dynamics with motivational slogans.
These books succeed not because they are accurate, but because they are easy to read and make readers feel good.
Main Idea: Create something entirely new. Avoid competition. Monopolies are better.
What’s partly true: Yes, monopolies are more profitable. That’s well known.
What’s misleading:
Thiel promotes the idea that great companies are born from singular insight. In reality, most companies pivot repeatedly and succeed through iteration.
He oversimplifies market dynamics, ignoring the role of strategic partnerships and collaborative ecosystems.
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.
What’s missing:
No discussion of real startup mechanics like team dynamics, fundraising timelines, cost structures, or customer acquisition.
Counterexample:
Airbnb didn’t invent a new concept—it executed better within an existing space.
Main Idea: Automate and outsource your work to live more freely.
What’s partly true: Delegation and automation can increase efficiency.
What’s misleading:
Ferriss generalizes from fringe cases. He presents digital arbitrage schemes and outsourcing as a universal path to freedom.
The idea of “mini-retirements” ignores the intensity required to build anything meaningful.
What’s missing:
No discussion of long-term brand building, legal issues in outsourcing, or strategic depth.
Counterexample:
Stripe was built through deep technical focus and years of sustained effort—not four-hour shortcuts.
Main Idea: A strong sense of purpose drives business success.
What’s partly true: A clear mission can help unify a team or attract certain customers.
What’s misleading:
Sinek overstates the importance of purpose. In practice, customers buy based on utility and price, not ideology.
Many companies retroactively assign a mission after achieving traction.
What’s missing:
No analysis of market fit, product iteration, or pricing strategy.
Counterexample:
Amazon scaled through operational excellence, not brand mission.
Main Idea: Build–Measure–Learn cycles help startups adapt and reduce waste.
What’s partly true: Fast iteration and feedback loops are helpful.
What’s misleading:
The MVP concept is often overused to justify low-quality products.
Metrics are treated as precise guides without accounting for interpretation or strategy.
What’s missing:
Lacks attention to capital planning, go-to-market execution, or founder psychology under uncertainty.
Counterexample:
Apple avoided MVPs, choosing instead to launch highly polished products.
Main Idea: Successful companies share common leadership traits and disciplined cultures.
What’s partly true: Strong leadership and discipline are helpful.
What’s misleading:
The book suffers from selection bias. Many “great” companies later failed.
It presents correlation as causation.
What’s missing:
No real discussion of technology cycles, financial structuring, or economic context.
Counterexample:
Fannie Mae, once praised in the book, played a major role in the 2008 financial collapse.
Main Idea: Startups are painful, and there are no easy answers.
What’s partly true: Founding a company is often chaotic and stressful.
What’s misleading:
The book turns specific experiences into generalized lessons without clear frameworks.
Key decisions (e.g., firing, fundraising) are discussed narratively rather than analytically.
What’s missing:
No structured treatment of capital efficiency, equity dilution, or risk-weighted decision-making.
Counterexample:
Many companies succeeded by avoiding avoidable chaos—Shopify scaled steadily with methodical planning.
A total airport book.
Main Idea: Caring less about unimportant things leads to a better life.
What’s partly true: Obsessing over irrelevant issues wastes time and energy.
What’s misleading:
The book wraps fatalism in edgy language and markets it as practical wisdom.
Manson’s branding depends on carefully curating an image of not caring, which is itself a contradiction.
What’s missing:
Offers no frameworks, strategies, or useful tools for people building complex systems or organizations.
Counterexample:
Every successful founder gave tremendous attention to detail. Caring deeply is essential.
I read business books like these consistently for two years. I took notes, applied the advice, and expected meaningful change.
None came.
There were no improved outcomes, no smarter decisions, just temporary motivation and wasted time.
Glorified procrastination, at best.
Before I started my first company, I worked for over ten years as a quantitative analyst at a top-tier financial firm.
We built mathematical models to price risk in real-time.
When I entered the startup world, I mistakenly followed the MVP playbook. We launched too early, misread feedback, and ended up iterating around noise.
What saved the company wasn’t lean methodology. It was building something so good that users couldn’t ignore it.
I’ve hired engineers who were obsessed with quality and passed on candidates with vague “passion.”
I’ve killed deals when the numbers didn’t make sense, regardless of hype.
Nothing I’ve learned about building successful ventures came from mainstream business books.
It came from confronting consequences.
1. Focus on reality, not narrative
Real markets don’t follow tidy story arcs. Most success stories are retrospective rationalizations of random walks.
2. Strategy is situational and dynamic
There is no universal playbook. The right strategy depends on timing, capital, and team capabilities.
3. Operational knowledge matters
Concepts like churn, CAC:LTV, regulatory constraints, and compensation structure determine outcomes. Most pop-business books ignore these.
4. Small, smart decisions compound
Breakthroughs are rare. Endurance and accumulation win.
5. Mastery beats motivation
Learn accounting, incentive design, and probability before chasing feel-good mantras.
Not all books are empty. Some are rigorous, detailed, and worth your time—usually written by academics, not entrepreneurs. Examples:
These aren’t easy reads.
They require real cognitive effort.
But they offer lasting value.
The most successful founders don’t memorize slogans.
They absorb complexity, adapt intelligently, and think in systems.
Most business books won’t help you do that.
Write your own playbook—with decisions, not quotes.
Be well,
Jack
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Comments
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/
> 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)
I think "turned coach" is incredibly key here. Being a part, or even the head, of a successful business is not sufficient.
It is necessary to test those key insights/theories across the widest possible landscape. Across wildly different businesses with wildly different models, founders and internal cultures. Only then is it possible to meaningfully separate which insights are truly general, and which are heavily contingent on specifics.
The books the author critiques are primarily self-centered stories of success, which don't take sufficient meta-analysis of the context. Not that these stories aren't valuable, but only with a sufficiently robust knowledge of textbook business and economics to take each story sceptically and in context.
Given the consistency with which I've been recommended many of these exact books, I consider the Authors criticism necessary and well founded, if perhaps a bit narrowly focused.
By mrandish 2025-05-1017:42 > I think "turned coach" is incredibly key here.
I agree but think "turned coach" is necessary but not sufficient. Being a successful practitioner doesn't require fully and deeply understanding all the key elements which contributed to their success. Many do but certainly not all. Even among those able to introspect and analyze, that doesn't mean they have the skills to teach it to others which requires high-level skills in observation, communication, and adapting to the student's context.
So, I think the best case coach is someone who successfully and repeatedly did it, who understands the key elements of doing it successfully, and has repeatedly taught others to be successful. Even determining that is challenging because successful practitioners turned coach tend to get the best, highest-potential students. In the case of a coach who never did it, if they get even one successful enough student, the reputation effects can quickly compound into getting their pick of the best students.
Further complicating the process of identifying a great coach for you is the meta aspect that student success isn't solely dependent on the quality of the coach or teacher. Student ability, drive and other elements are huge factors. Serially successful coaches are probably demonstrating their ability to identify those innate traits in student selection as much as their teaching ability.
Yep I think people just want the fast track to being rich and are not interested into putting the hours and the grind for it. There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that. But for the most part, that's where the real knowledge is.
They would rather read 10-15 books on marketing rather than study and master a single textbook about marketing. Even when they don't have to master all of it and that would still give them more value and professional knowledge than reading all of these other books.
I read my far share of business books and at some points I was seeing the edutainment behind it and the lack of value that from now on every time I search for a book I start by searching in the textbook section on Amazon not the book section.
By memco 2025-05-1016:30 > There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that.
I would recommend to you, the author of the OP and others in this thread read “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. It is old but it has had amazing sticking powe in my idea of what is entertainment and what is informational. He argues that many things are made to be entertainment (even some books that are thousands of pages) and challenges readers to consider this when deciding what to invest into. We can’t all be experts on everything so we make decisions, consciously and unconsciously about when and where to draw the line based on what information is available, how it’s presented and how much the value/work tradeoff is to study/consume it in that format.
I think the sting comes when we see people ignore low hanging fruit especially willfully but we would be less critical of someone saying that the task at hand is beyond their current capacity that someone else might be better suited to a particular task or topic.
> There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that. But for the most part, that's where the real knowledge is.
huh, hard disagree on this one. In my experience, there is zero correlation between length and insights.
By bdelmas 2025-05-1217:32 I don't look for the book with the maximum page length... Plus just talking about page length when talking about book vs textbook it's to miss the critical difference in content, format, and who each is made for. You forgot 2 metrics: ratings, and comments.
Can you list some long textbooks on a single subject that are amazing?
By ayrtondesozzla 2025-05-110:30 PAIP
RE4B
By TheOtherHobbes 2025-05-1017:411 reply What's a good master-level textbook about marketing?
By bdelmas 2025-05-1217:36 You probably saw them: Marketing Management and Marketing Principles by Philip Kotler. They are a good starting point.
Can you recommend any textbooks on marketing or another business subject?
By bdelmas 2025-05-1217:51 Marketing Management by Philip Kotler is the reference.
For the rest it depends on what you need since they are very focused on one domain but for instance for accounting/finance: Cost Accounting by Charles Horngren, or Managerial Accounting for Managers by Eric Noreen is a must.
Strategor - English version by João Albino-Pimentel is amazing. A lot of tools to get started are there with very neat examples from the industry.
I have a few books that are great too. But if there is one to buy it could: The Personal MBA and then for each section get real education one way or another. From textbooks or anything.
By yial 2025-05-1018:22 The annual letter to shareholders is such a great signal that seems to be missed by a lot of people I encounter in business.
They’ll read current popular books. Or even older ones. But seem to miss scale / times / people / resources and mis apply.* (I agree with your statement about waiting - or if you want to read it applying heavy discernment ).
However, they don’t seem to have the same interest in reading shareholder letters. I’ll add that certain annual reports can contain really helpful information about economic realities, marketing, logistics, etc. (Home Depot’s is a surprisingly good example - again- if you apply some discernment to what you’re reading).
*by that I mean if you’re an executive at a 15 person company, that’s experiencing stagnation or slow (3-5% growth) and dealing with physical widgets, trying to emulate Twitter, Airbnb, or SaaS businesses might not be the right move.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve read the blog post as well. I think what’s missing is a list of business books you’d recommend. Otherwise, I’m not sure what kind of business books you’re talking about.
By jjude 2025-05-1015:16 - In the blog post I linked to the "best business books" by "Personal MBA": https://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
- I talked about 3 letters to shareholders
- And talked about the Bible
- I talked about books by Alan Weiss & Derek Sivers
By enos_feedler 2025-05-1014:331 reply I think the top book for any one person isn't the top book recommended by everyone the most. In my experience I’ve had to wade through 30 books to find my own gem. No aggregate data could have led me more directly to that gem. It takes real work to hunt for what works best and great satisfaction in finding it.
By jjude 2025-05-1015:18 > isn't the top book recommended by everyone the most
Agreed. everyone's context is different and hence the books are different; even the lesson gained for the same book will be different.
By daryllxd 2025-05-113:03 Great comment and blog post man. I think you crystallised what I've been wondering, why do some business or self-improvement books feel they could have been a tweet like you said.
By veunes 2025-05-1011:06 A book doesn't have to be comprehensive to be useful, but knowing when and how to apply its lens is everything
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.
Don't forget the tried-and-true "Don't sell to your customers; listen for their actual needs" advice that's repeated ad nauseum in a thousand different ways by B2B experts who claim to have "cracked the code" to increasing sales.
By turnsout 2025-05-1014:09 It's repeated because so few people actually talk to customers and meaningfully listen to them… But you're right, it has become overused.
An interesting counterpoint to "listen to your customers" is The Innovator's Dilemma, which details how increasing profit and producing a better product for your customers can sometimes make a company vulnerable to disruption.
By calmbonsai 2025-05-100:531 reply I would also add taking steps to "increase luck surface area". One can't control luck and luck is, unfortunately, essential, but one can increase the opportunities for luck to play its part.
By airstrike 2025-05-101:07 one corollary is that "proximity is power". being around people who are successful increases the chances that you will be successful. easier said than done, however.
Where does the point of being disagreeable come from and what purpose does it serve in the business world, in your opinion or according to these books?
By anself 2025-05-105:22 You need at least one or two somewhat disagreeable folks in a team. Because without this, groupthink emerges, teams have too much inertia, they follow the assumed norm instead of challenging it for something better, they don’t debate the options enough. That disagreeable energy, in the right dose, leads to better decisions. If you don’t have it naturally, you can encourage someone to “play devil’s advocate” in decision discussions (or do it yourself) and you’ll find sometimes the devil’s advocate is actually right.
By hackflip 2025-05-1411:45 Disagreeable people are insurance policies. When the group is right, they are a drag. When the group is wrong, they are necessary.
By Esophagus4 2025-05-100:29 Thanks, you just saved me half of my reading list!
By adamgordonbell 2025-05-101:475 reply 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.
By georgeecollins 2025-05-107:101 reply Great list! If you are interested in complicated deals I strongly recommend Eccentric Orbits, about the Iridium satellite network. Its a real page turner. Also perhaps House of Krupp, though that one is a bit dark.
By thosch0 2025-05-1021:32 I’d like to add Never Lost Again, which is the story of the team that eventually built Google Maps
By milkshakes 2025-05-101:492 reply don't forget the smartest guys in the room
By wilkystyle 2025-05-1016:54 Bethany McLean is great. I also enjoyed "All The Devils Are Here"
By sam1r 2025-05-103:19 Thank you so much for this list composition.
Agree. This is a great list. I’ve read 7 of them and frequently remember actionable anecdotes, whereas I hardly remember the key point from “serious” business books.
By 9dev 2025-05-106:36 And that makes perfect sense. There’s a reason why we tell children social norms via fairy tales and monster stories; humans are very susceptible to a good tale, those tend to stick in your brain like little else.
By nathan_compton 2025-05-1015:382 reply This is a personal thing and probably not good, but I just hate narratives. Like stories are so contingent and our interpretation of our lives so irrational that I have almost no interest in the peculiar sequence of events that constitute people's lives. I especially dislike them when someone has curated them into a book, because that process is also often disingenuous, self-laudatory, irrational, or pulled around by other incentives.
I love people, I just don't care that much about how they think they got where they are.
There is a spicy quote which I resonate with. Something to the effect of tiny minds think about people, bigger minds think about events and galaxy brains think about ideas. When I read, I just really want to get to the ideas. I could not give two shits about people and I barely care about the events.
By jeremyscanvic 2025-05-1016:44 I sympathize with your view and I dislike it as much as the next guy when people prove dubious points from poorly convincing stories, but here's how I view things: badly told stories are frustrating, and it is difficult to tell stories well.
The thing with (real) stories is they relate facts in a structured and somewhat neutral way (causality). This allows you, the reader, to learn things that are beyond the author's point. Essays, on the other hand, don't allow that as authors can (should) always leave out everything that does not support their point without compromising the text.
By whattheheckheck 2025-05-133:09 Ideas mean nothing unless they link to meat space
By 0xDEAFBEAD 2025-05-109:201 reply I picked up Barbarians at the Gate the other year, but put it down when I realized all it was doing was making me fantasize about all the useless toys I could buy myself if I was really rich. A good book to read if you want to dream about being an avaricious plutocrat.
Personally I'd like to see more rich people follow the Bill Gates model of giving almost all of it away.
By SonOfLilit 2025-05-1013:24 Interesting, I can't recall any specific expensive toy except that the RKR guy's wife liked expensive interior design, and my main takeaway from it was "accountants can make unimaginable amounts of money, both by creating value and destroying it, pay attention to the accounting perspective".
