Ask HN: Fictional business books like The Goal

11 points·jimnotgym··7 comments

I feel like The Goal and The Phoenix Project were seminal books, partly because their fictional style allowed people to see the ideas in applied form. Are there any other fictional business books we should be reading

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It's designed more for kids, but I found it useful for understanding basic accounting concepts: The Accounting Game: Basic Accounting From the Lemonade Stand.

I also found two of the novels in Clavell's Asian Saga to be quite business-focused: Tai-Pan and Noble House. Not so much for the nuts-and-bolts of business, but just a large business organization being founded and growing over the course of multiple centuries.

I'm a big fan of The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom DeMarco.

See my notes: https://www.thomas-huehn.com/the-deadline/

Get a Grip by Gino Wickman introduces EOS through a narrative story.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni is another classic.

Another one by the same author, which I heartily recommend, is "The Ideal Team Player". Read it many years ago, and I still use it as a basic framework when I interview candidates (in a nutshell, you want someone humble, hungry, and smart).

I personally wouldn't recommend "Death by Meeting", though. Maybe it's just because it didn't resonate much with me, so YMMV.

Did you not find the CEO’s omnipotence tiresome? That was the general consensus of my grad school management class.

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