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:
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Thiel promotes the idea that great companies are born from singular insight. In reality, most companies pivot repeatedly and succeed through iteration.
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He oversimplifies market dynamics, ignoring the role of strategic partnerships and collaborative ecosystems.
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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:
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No discussion of real startup mechanics like team dynamics, fundraising timelines, cost structures, or customer acquisition.
Counterexample:
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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:
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Ferriss generalizes from fringe cases. He presents digital arbitrage schemes and outsourcing as a universal path to freedom.
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The idea of “mini-retirements” ignores the intensity required to build anything meaningful.
What’s missing:
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No discussion of long-term brand building, legal issues in outsourcing, or strategic depth.
Counterexample:
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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:
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Sinek overstates the importance of purpose. In practice, customers buy based on utility and price, not ideology.
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Many companies retroactively assign a mission after achieving traction.
What’s missing:
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No analysis of market fit, product iteration, or pricing strategy.
Counterexample:
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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 a
20 Comments
peterlk
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.
JohnnyHerz
While there is certainly a lot of crap out there for business books, especially on sales/marketing and management, there are some core books that are must reads if you want to save 30 years of trial and error.
1. E-myth Revisited (absolute must read for small to midsize business owners)
2. Competitive Strategy
3. Discipline of Market Leaders
4. Good to Great
5. Built to Last
rodolphoarruda
It may be a waste of time if you had lived long enough to experience vividly the ins and outs of the business world. Taking an extreme example, senior execs who had "climbed from the bottom" in international companies. These people have seen/lived a lot, so no business book can really impress them or show something they haven't already seen. On the flip side, there is a high number of young people eager to learn how things work in the business world, but they don't want to experience everything, every failure, the ups and downs, they want to cut corners. I think for that kind of people business books can add some value, especially the biographical ones. It doesn't need to be the biography of a CEO (e.g. Jobs'). The life story of a great salesperson can change your mindset forever.
d_silin
"An ounce of practice beats a pound of theory, but a pound of practice needs an ounce of theory."
Valid for any domain for book knowledge vs practical experience.
firesteelrain
You could probably put books like Team Topologies, Accelerate, and The Phoenix Project in the same boat with this list of business entertainment set of books and arguably the DevOps Handbook too
rfarley04
Feels like it's the act of meditating on making things better, brought about by reading some unscientific and generally unimportant "framework" that matters more than the framework itself. Business books just force certain people to keep business improvement higher on their awareness. People who can keep that meditation high on their list without the books don't need the books.
redeux
There are plenty of great business books out there that aren't pop business books. For every critique listed there's a corresponding book that covers the topic.
I hope people don't expect to get an MBA's worth of content from a single book. Business is a subject that can be taught in schools or learned through self-study – either requires time and dedication. Whichever method you choose, you'll still need real-world experience to master it.
jibal
Bottom line: entrepreneurs writing books are trying to make a buck off of readers.
abetaha
I am always amazed how most business book authors take a simple idea that could be described in one page, and turn it into a 200+ page book with popularizing narrative. What's more amazing is that the ideas are usually commonsense, but due to human nature are seldom practiced.
bsder
And are often complete fiction. See: In Search of Excellence
8note
i think of books like
* the secret life of groceries
* omnivore's dillema
* toy story
* the box
as business books. they have a bunch of case studies and union politics and a general idea theyre trying to convey.
without industry experience, i wouldnt conceive that there's an occupation of "buyer" or what it is they do, without having read those books.
BeetleB
Most popular nonfiction is entertainment. When I realized this I went back to reading fiction. The quality of entertainment is so much better!
garrickvanburen
I’m always hesitant to drag books written in a different era through today’s sensibilities.
For all the complaints of these books today (and I’ve complained about Lean Startup as recently as Dec 2024) these were written in a different time and likely written about tactics obsolete at the time of publication.
Let’s allow them to be artifacts of their time.
motoxpro
I have the complete opposite take to the person who wrote this article.
Most business books are collections of experiences with the takeaways that a person had based on those experiences, whether strategy, market dynamics of the time, unique insight, etc.
It's the readers job to understand and apply what is applicable to their situation. To say the study of past history is unless because businesses are no longer doing great is crazy. That would be like an athlete saying Tiger Woods' golf swing advice is no longer relevant because he was only good in hindsight, and he can't do it anymore.
Every single "counterexample" in this article is just hindsight, which, ironically, is the article's argument for why business books are useless. They just wrote their own survivorship-biased article version of one.
It's only now that we realize that AirBnb would cannibalize the hotel business. If people had known that before, they wouldn't have had trouble raising money. Replacing a Ritz Carlton AND a Holiday Inn with a random person's home was so far from obvious.
It's only now that we realize that Stripe was focused on years of operational excellence and not a gimmick of "take payments with 7 lines of code." Replace it with AI and you have a tangential version of the tagline on every SaaS company's homepage today.
It's only now that Apple has the product experience to not build MVPs where, before, they were about to go bankrupt doing the same thing.
The "mistakes" the person made were all covered in the books they read. And all of the things they say they wanted are tactical (LTV:CAC, Incentive Design, Churn, etc.), which makes sense as they are a quant.
I would have more respect if people who bash business books could have called all of the "counterexamples" this person gave (which would mean they would be billionaires) or could call the current day examples that will not be true in 15 years by putting their money behind them OR their businesses go on to be successful (by whatever metric you want) for the next 20 years.
It's just not that easy, there are no silver bullets, but it's useful to study what has already been done.
Quenby
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adamgordonbell
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.
morsecodist
I totally agree with the sentiment. I am pretty skeptical of this sort of broad advice. People who achieve success did so under specific conditions. It is unclear which aspects of their strategy are universal and which were only effective under their conditions. Advice based on a broader survey of examples may be a bit better but we need to be honest about how hard it is to extract meaningful insights from this sort of thing. Even something like the time period you picked your examples from has huge implications for what you are studying.
unmole
I'd extend it to business news.
MantisShrimp90
Thank you, most of these books are actively harmful, and the lack of intellectual rigor makes them exactly this, entertainment masquerading as education.
What matters is humility, thoughtfulness, and a relentless focus on quality. These books sell to people that want all of the inspiration with none of the work.
deepsquirrelnet
Having come up through hard sciences, I don’t ever know what to do with these kinds of books. If they were written as memoirs, then that’s a different story. That’s all they usually are, but they’re presented in more of an educational/instructional context, yet are devoid of rigor.
I’ve had ‘Running Things’ on my shelf for quite a while, but just don’t feel compelled to read it. To me it’s just a weird genre. Slightly dishonest or something.