Three Best Business Books of 2019 (According to Every Other Best-of-2019 List) | Hacker News Reader

Three Best Business Books of 2019 (According to Every Other Best-of-2019 List)

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75 pointssmalera21 comments

The only way to win is not to play.

Read some nice fiction. If you find yourself in a crowd that wants to talk about this stuff, find a blog that summarizes books like this into a few bullets or paragraphs.

> If you find yourself in a crowd that wants to talk about this stuff, find a blog that summarizes books like this into a few bullets or paragraphs.

A long time ago, I created a web site that did this. It wasn't real successful, but I did cover the cost of some books, a few of which were actually worth reading.

There's a quote out there somewhere about how most business books could fit their core concept into 10 pages. But since there's no market for 10 page books, they get fluffed up.

> find a blog that summarizes books like this into a few bullets or paragraphs.

I personally find this is really important with business books. It is very rare that you need lots of depth, but you benefit immensely from breadth and understanding a lot of competing perspectives on a topic.

You also benefit a lot from knowing a bit about a whole range of business topics, even if you are only a sole technical contributor. Business books are generally a poor source for this knowledge unless they are case studies. Models used in business and management courses can often be covered on a piece of paper.

https://sivers.org/book

My personal favorite

I've found when I read business books, I usually know about 1/2 of what's in it, don't care about the next 49%, and then there is that 1% that is brand new amazing wisdom that I couldn't have found anywhere else.

I then internalize that wisdom and promptly forget where it came from, which makes me useless at helping others with this knowledge.

If there was a way for me to make an AI that could just find these wisdom nuggets without all the work of reading a whole book, that would be super powerful.

Sadly, I think that's a pretty hard AI problem to solve. At least today.

Have you tried Blinkist? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blinkslabs...

Can you list some recent books you read and their 1%? That would be awesome.

Parent's complaint is specifically that he can't remember which books he read.

2019 is actually the best time to pick the 3 Best Business Books of 2009 (Yes, 2009!).

Googling for "Best Business Books of 2009", I'm struck by how few of them I would bother reading today. I remember Shop Class as Soulcraft fondly, although it was a bit of a slog at times, and Brightsided is still on my Goodreads To-read list, but otherwise... Would anyone who's read it recommend Lords of Finance - if so, I'll add it to the list after Brightsided.

But really, do any of those three count as "business" books in the traditional sense?

Range was enjoyable, but it was essentially just a mirror image of Outliers. The same sort of interesting anecdotes about some people you've heard of and some you haven't, but saying you should eschew 10k hours in favor of a more broad experience.

Felt like a very "poppy" sort of management book. Not bad, but def not highly recommended.

Every time I see a reference to the 10k hour rule I can't help but think back to this article:

https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule-was-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_(golfer)

What a fantastic yet somewhat tragic example. Thank you for sharing

There is a better book called Talent is Overrated that stresses these differences.

I feel like range was enjoyable and i understand the theory, however the reality of the job market seems to be in rewarding narrow skilled specialists. I'm not sure how this gets resolved as a person with range in the market place. My thoughts are that this leads to 1. entrepreneurship, 2. going in at more junior roles to compensate for the lack of percieved experience in that role, or 3.finding unique roles (which do exist if you look hard enough but can be a bit tricky to find especially in terms of location-individual fit and it can be hard to have roots when your chasing opportunities to work).

Utterly banal content marketing discussion of the books which goes on and on but says very little.

The books are:

Range - David Epstein

Nine Lies About Work - Marcus Buckingham / Ashley Goodall

Loonshots - Safi Bahcall

His fluffily meaningless takeaways which apparently bind the three books and are a common theme:

How can I be better at solving hard problems? Take a bigger view!

How can I work better with those around me? Trust them to share their knowledge and use that knowledge differently.

How can I bring new things into the world? Hold the innovation and the delivery in equal regard, give each what it needs, and think hard about what your organization rewards.

I understand the value they add, but medium.com and Pinterest should really be banned by google and HN due to their efforts in making the flow of useful information harder. On medium for example, one has to pay to be able to read the article. I was considering taking my blog to medium.com but given how they basically own the article I would never do that.

I have been seeing a lot of hype around "Range", I read it and thought it was good but I felt like he just took ideas from other good books and combined them into his work.

The trick about business books is that generally they are quite short, like a few pages long. The problem is a three page book doesn’t work on an airport bookshop shelf, so they are padded out. This is even true of the good ones.

Good example is crossing the chasm. An insightful book (at least when it can out) but really is one drawing and perhaps one page of explanation.

Innovator’s dilemma: one graph and a few pages of explanation (it was a non-obvious thesis). Good insight though is it actionable? And some of the examples were...perhaps not really supported.

But at least 99.999% of business books contain 0 pages of insight.

For me, personally, "Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies" by Jim Collins, still stands as THE canon to read for a business book. His research based style resonates with me and makes me trust the findings much more.

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