Over the years, I’ve had to suffer from some of those pop business books that managers try to implelement.
You know the type. Who Moved my Cheese?, Fred, or Fish.
What’s the worst one your company ever tried to use?
For me, it would have to be Fish.
Choose your attitude? Umm, yeah. I"ll take business advice from a bunch of 20 something slackers making minimum wage who are choosing their attitude while they’re wired on two double lattes and a few hits off the bong.
Well, I wonder if we could define what makes a “Business Book” good, and worth reading? Then we can say which ones we hated the most and why.
Personally, I liked Fish. I thought it really made people think about why you should be happy even if your job is crappy. [terrible]
It was slightly hokey but I liked it.
So what do you think makes a good business book? So we can juxtapose.
Agreed. Fish was the biggest pile of crap I’ve seen in a long time. Not only did you get some touchy-feely know-your-emotions bilge, but you got it packaged in a cute little romance at the same time! gag
All of these management strategy books have one thing in common…finding some way other than the most effective one (money) to get people to work more enthusiastically. I don’t care if I’m some sort of emotional-share-holder in the community-equity of the company I work for. I just want to be paid well. Instead of buying into a sea of metaphors by umpteen different trend-exploiting “experts”, howzabout upping my compensation, cash or benefits, either one works.
I’ve never read one. Aren’t they all bullshit, though?
They’ve always puzzled me.
Does anyone who has ever read one think that successful businessmen actually read them? Don’t you think that Warren Buffet would crack up laughing if he opened one?
I’ve always thought they were for people who never went to college, are currently trying to sell Jamba Juice and are wondering why they can’t get ahead. And, think the answer is that they need to clearly define their goals, or whatever Chapter 7 might be called.
I wouldn’t be any quicker to take it from their supervisor, who is likely so pissed off he is giving serious thought to importing illiterate teenage Albanians and keeping them as slaves in an underground bunker.
My business is successful and I only have one or two “Business Books” on my shelf. Many of them are anecdotal accounts of how someone made it big with some widget they invented or system of practice they employ. Many of those are bullshit. But there are few that stand out that I really enjoyed. For instance, I found Rich Dad Poor Dad very informative and was impressed with the authors genuine attitude. That is not exactly a business book, more of a Finance book, but both genres tend to be like biting into card board.
Rich Dad Poor Dad is so full of shit, it’s a wonder all the pages aren’t brown. John T. Reed’s page on the book, while disorganized, is as good a place as any to read up on some of the issues.
I’d say that the only two I’ve ever read that really seemed worthwhile were “The Goal”, by Eliyahu Goldratt, and “It’s Your Ship” by CAPT Michael Abrashoff.
Those two seemed to resonate with me, mostly because they were the application of common sense that goes against the usual corporate culture and practices, and it made sense that their lessons would actually work, or I’d actually seen examples of their stuff myself, and the books explained why it worked.
“The Goal” is essentially about companies and people figuring out what their ultimate goal is, and aligning everything to achieve that goal.
“It’s Your Ship” is a management book where a Navy officer explains some good management techniques and attitudes in the context of the ship he commanded. I’ve seen a lot of his stuff in action at various times of my life, and from what I can tell, Abrashoff is dead on target as far as getting people motivated and on track.
My girlfriend has Suze Orman’s entire ouevre on a bookshelf in the apartment. I managed to get through the first chapter of The Money Book for the Young, Broke and Fabulous before I decided my brain needed washing.
I bet there’s some other guy out there who wrote a book about how your business has to be flexible, and not focus too much on one thing. And, he probably made a successful business with that model.
Businesses are so individual. I’m part owner of a small, shitty one. My wife has her own business. My dad used to own a pharmacy.
The things you need to be successful (like work hard) aren’t things you can get out of a book.
It’s one of those things where I think that if you need a book, it’s probably too late.
(I’ve also heard mostly negative things about Rich Dad, Poor Dad.)
there’s a difference between “how to succeed in business” and personal finance, which is what Suze Orman writes about.
I think you can contain all we need to know in one personal finance book. It’s amazing how many people have sold tons of books on that.
Yeah, but I’m not in business so I don’t read business-self-help books. Besides, it’s the same sort of advice.
My stepdad (who was a successful enough businessman to have spent a couple of years on the Forbes 400 back in the mid-80s) swears by Trump’s books.
I’ve been forced to read a lot of these books. The worst, though, was something called Leadership Jazz. Here’s the whole book in two words: “I’m awesome.”
The place I work unveiled the Fish thing last February. So far it’s resulted in a college basketball pool, a “Guess the employee by their baby picture” contest and a memo from the owner saying all posters, etc related to contests must be kept in the basement.
It’s been a life changing experience.
I think the problem is that not everyone is motivated by the same things so the whole office contests vs. more money vs. telecommuting is moot. Many of my coworkers seem really motivated by the “family atmosphere” of the office but that doesn’t matter to me at all. I would go from really not liking my job very much to being pretty content with my job if they would let me telecommute a couple days a week. I have a coworker who would be pleased as punch if she never had to talk to anyone in the office again. If they gave her some space and never actually spoke to her directly her productivity would increase by about 1000%.
Honestly taking the stress and time constraints of my commute away a day or two a week would make a huge difference in my productivity levels. If they moved my hours from 9 to 5 to 11 to 7 or 12 to 8 that would be great too, but mostly because it would make interviewing for other jobs I might like better much easier. 
Fashionable business books are of no value whatsoever. I worked for my father’s management consulting firm in the 90s, and we saw every one of them come down the pike, and they were all worthless tripe, the lot of them. Some weren’t actively stupid, but constituted a few good ideas blown up to 400 pages - The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People is the perfect example thereof. Nothing Covey says in the book is stupid, but it’s seven times longer than it needs to be. Most of the rest were sub-idiotic garbage.
When people read such books, they tend to go through a process called “Affirmation,” as my Dad put it (and made a point of observing.) A person would pick up a book like Seven Habits, read it, nod their heads, blather the buzzwords for awhile, and continue doing things exactly the way they had always done them. No matter what the book said, they’d agree with it in words and apply none of the actions.
He (my Dad, not Stephen Covey) ended up using a test. At the beginning (I think; it might have been another book) of Seven Habits, Covey writes that you should put your five key priorities in your life on a wallet-sized card and carry it around with you. It’s not a suggestion; it’s something written very definitively, “Before you continue reading this book, go do this, and only then, continue reading.” My father asked every single person who claimed to have read and understood the book where their values card was. Not a single one of them had it. Not one, out of scores, maybe hundreds of people. Here was a simple, straightfoward, unambiguous instruction that would have taken you three minutes to do, and not ONE person followed it (except my Dad, but he was making a point.) If these people weren’t going to do that, what’s the likelihood they were going to follow Covey’s instructions to change the way you live your life?
Management books don’t work for the same reason you can 't buy a book called “Become a Physician In 14 Days!” or “The One-Volume Guide To Being a Successful Trial Lawyer” - because expertise isn’t something you can pack up in a single package. Business and management acumen is something you build by knowing a lot of different things through experience, education, self-learning and hard knocks. You become a good manager by having a bunch of skills across a broad range of areas, by getting your feet wet in some low-level supervisory roles, by taking training courses, learning about other parts of business besides your own career path, and learning how to work with people. There are lots and lots of books you can read that will help you in business but they’re all specific to something; an economics textbook, a book on plasma and laser cutting of metals, the course materials for a marketing course, a book on applying ISO 14001, a book on accountancy for small business. You can’t find it all in one volume.
This isn’t to say you can’t learn stuff from books, or that new business ideas can’t have value; there’s a lot of value in Lean manufacturing, 5-S, ISO 9001, and lots of other stuff, even if you just learn about them, what they’re about, and take from them what’s useful to you. Marketing and sales courses are a great idea if you’re not in marketing and sales; product courses can teach you a lot. I am very skeptical of people who say they know everything, my “cow-workers” are idiots, my managers are idiots, everyone not in my function is an idiot, I don’t learn anything from the courses they send me on, I don’t make mistakes, blah blah blah. Anyone who says they know it all and is disdainful of learning opportunities is a bloody fool who knows far less than they think they do. If you aren’t looking for something to learn, you’re selling yourself short.
Most fad management books, however, are exactly the opposite. They’re thinly veiled promises that you can skip on most of the learning part - that the Big Shortcut is to be found in the book, and you don’t have to spend any time grinding through learning stuff one thing at a time.
*Fish * was one of my least favorites. As I recall, it was wholely about attitude and didn’t include much in the way of concrete steps. I’m not really a “turn that frown upside down” type of gal. And the romance, blergh!
My favorite business book is a little gem called *Never Confuse a Memo with Reality * by Richard Moran.
That’s my biggest gripe about almost all these types of books. Some may have an essentially good idea that could be concise and to the point and would fill up about the length of a tri-fold pamphlet. But since no one gets rich selling pamphlets they blabber on until they can get it into a book form.
The business 101 rule KISS (keep it simple stupid) is completely lost on these folks.
That’s rule two. Rule one is “make money from stupid people.”
Re the values card, after I read the first few pages of Seven Habits (I didn’t bother finishing), I took to carrying a small copy of the Ten Commandments in my wallet, so I could cross them off as I broke them. 
That “review” is complete looniness. The writer obviously has a personal vendetta. Rich Dad… is nothing profound, but it has a simple lesson that all kids should be taught (adults too) - buy assets that appreciate or provide cashflow, avoid depreciating assets. I explain this to my kids, and they get it, but it’s not something they understood beforehand.
Who Moved My Cheese was foisted upon me a few years back, when the company came out with a new product that made our old one obsolete. Our entire business model changed. In one year, about 40% of the sales force either quit or got fired. I’m not even sure those who left couldn’t handle the change, they just refused to change. The book may be, um, cheesy, but it was damned accurate. I don’t think the book is really helpful from a business perspective because all it says is “embrace change” but it doesn’t tell people how to do it. Some people are just incapable of changing habits.