How to read a business book | Hacker News Reader

How to read a business book

sethgodin.typepad.com

17 pointsgetp23 comments

"The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change."

- Well said. I have read my share of business books, and wish I had stuck to this philosophy. I have begun to take a lot of notes on index cards, and attempted to apply at least one principle from each book that I read (think of it as "Deliberate Practice" [http://tinyurl.com/6da4ey]).

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of bad books out there, so its hard to know whether you are wasting your time with a bad book, or wasting your time because it happens to be a really good book but you don't happen to do anything with it. The problem that I face is separating the wheat from the chaff - most business books that hit the bestsellers normally have a huge marketing engine behind them, which does not necessarily make them great books. On the other hand, books like "Think and Grow Rich" which you can pick up at Half Price Books for $3 is something I read every year (once).

On a side note - "Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program a certain tool." I disagree. A lot of programming books I have read just don't cut it and provide little or no value. Mainly because a lot of authors are playing catch up with the latest and greatest technologies and invariably the book is rushed to the printers just so that they are not a version or two behind. The ones that provide real value are the ones that have proven to be timeless (SICP, PAIP which I am yet to read).

You may like this: http://www.squeezedbooks.com

("Business Knowledge - Extracted, Compressed, Discussed")

Is that your site?

If more people contribute this would be great. (and maybe some design work)

It's my site, actually. Thanks kirubakaran for posting the link:-)

Frustratingly, that's about as good as I seem to be able to do in terms of design. Another good reason to get a cofounder who covers for some of your skill gaps, I guess.

In any case, yeah, I'd love for more people to contribute, at least to discussions, if not to the summaries. As note takers like ajju below have found, I absorbed the material a lot better by creating some of the summaries, so there is some benefit for summary creators, beyond just the value of sharing.

Your design seems perfectly good to me for what your site does. It has a library-like feel.

To get more attention, I think you should check out the FriendFeed API. Although it would mean more comments that aren't on your site, it would make it easier for people to share summaries.

Thanks for the great site, David.

I have a feature request. Can you please display a simple html table with title, author, link etc as columns for all the books squeezed? That will help find books.

Where would you see that linked from/to? Find books?

Yup. Thanks.

The recipe that makes up just about any business book can be condensed to just two or three pages. The rest is the sell. The proof. The persuasion.

I agree with the first sentence. But it seems to me the rest is generally mere bloat. Nearly all business books consist of an essay's worth of ideas diluted with a book's worth of words. Why are perfectly good essays ruined in this way? People pay for books, and they seem more impressive on CVs.

My advice about how to read business books is: don't. You'll learn a lot more by reading biography and history.

I agree in general, although I can think of a (very) few counterexamples - in particular, "The Essays of Warren Buffett", which collects fragments from Berkshire Hathaway annual letters into related topics.

No, business books sell well because of the fantasy aspect.

Business books are overwhelmingly bad - and still sell - because it's very difficult to verify anything said empirically. Most of the time, business isn't treated as a science (a mistake), and a lot of business books are written by people who are good salesmen, but not much else.

Good business books are very rare. They don't have marketing titles like "small is the new big", they don't feature the author's face on the front cover (where else but ego-centric business books does that happen?) and they don't endorse moronic checkbox routines like "Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. ".

Seth Godin is very much a junk author.

A science? I'm dubious. Too many factors to treat it very scientifically, or be able to repeat 'experiments'. Maybe there's room for some of that approach, but... it seems way too full of squishy human factors to get all that scientific about it.

> Good business books are very rare.

Any titles come to mind?

You can't do experiments very easily, but it's easy to examine empirically historical events.

As for good business books, I suppose I would "recommend" psychology, probably Dale Carnegie (thought it's the odd one out) and most traditional texts on finance and economics.

I would say business is a mixture of economics, finance and psychology, in that order.

I have been sitting management accounting exams for fun. (Well, really to keep in study mode - half an hour a night every night is maintainable - unless you stop, then restarting is hard.)

I would highly recommend them to programmers. Because the maths is frankly trivial for anyone with an engineering or CS degree the textbooks are easy enough to skim, and once you have digested them they give you a solid theoretical basis to attack business problems.

Understanding cost and revenue behavior may not be as sexy as making people stand up in meetings, but it's a damn sight more useful. At the very least it can give you a hint about which people you should make stand up.

Works for me.

I posit that the 3rd point "share your book" is as much about increasing the word of mouth for Mr. Godin's books as about helping readers increase value derived from the book.

I am a fan Seth Godin and his books. His second point about keeping notes is actually very true. If I am not making notes, I just read the book for the vicarious pleasure. Putting in the effort of taking notes forces me to digest and revise the points just to get returns on the effort I put into taking the notes.

I think it is also helpful to understand one's own motivation for picking up a given business book. For example, Kawasaki's Art of the Start is very useful for most startups, but invaluable for those chasing external funding. But Porter's Competitive Strategy is less useful (note: not necessarily <i>useless</i>) for a startup than it is for an established player looking to compete effectively in an established marketplace. The point being that if you understand the problem / context you have that requires resolution or action, then you can better judge whether reading a book is more or less likely to be a productive use of your time.

I do very much agree with Seth's second point: markup the book with tags and pencil as you read. I find this essential if I am to retain both the content and how I think/feel about implementing it in my own situation.

Heh, I picked up Competitive Strategy and am not sure what to think yet. It's fairly slow going in some ways.

"Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program a certain tool."

There have been a few technical books that have more than paid their cost based on finding the answer to just one vexing problem (DHTML bible, for example). Theoretically, the answer could have been googled but opening the book found it.

Where does he get that $30 amount? Every single technical book I've bought has cost me at least $50. Except for the Learn C++ in 21 Days book, which was on sale at Wal-Mart for $20.

I admit that the price is worth it in some cases, but $30?? Where's he find those books?!

It really does depend on the book. Looking at Amazon, the Django book, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, The Pickaxe, CSS Mastery and The Ruby Programming Language are all <$30 each and are all well regarded. I'm sure there's plenty more.

"It’s not about you, it’s about the next person."

Not just for business books, but for everything we do.

"Wreck a roast chicken and it’s $12 down the drain. Wreck a product launch and there goes your career..."

God help us if that was actually true. Temporarily hurt it, maybe.

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