Here is a brief excerpt from an article by David K. Hurst for s+b magazine, published by Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company), a member of the PwC network. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration by John Hersey
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As s+b marks 20 years of publication, we are looking back (and forward) to reflect on the themes, people, and ideas that have animated two decades of original thinking. This is the third in a series of blog posts.
It’s easy to be critical of business books. What had been a dull cottage industry until the publication of Tom Peters and Bob Waterman’s In Search of Excellence(1982) became an exuberant enterprise that churns out a vast number of products in many subcategories. Business books, in other words, have become a big business. The motives and abilities of the writers who toil in these segments — self-help, how-to, CEO biographies, corporate narratives, big-picture panoramas, focused functional pieces, to name a few— are as widely varied as the categories themselves. Serious research-based, academic efforts, sometimes well written but often full of impenetrable jargon, share shelf space with ghostwritten executive vanity puffs: sweet confections designed to buff images. There is a steady deluge of books from consultants, for whom business books are, at a minimum, thick business cards and essential to establishing their credentials.
As is the case with every genre, a few of these books are fantastic, some are good, and many are, alas, quite bad. At times, business books can read like expanded articles, bloated blogs, or padded PowerPoint presentations. Many writers assume that success implies capability and we can all become successful simply by studying success. The evidence for this is equivocal at best and riddled with attribution bias (our tendency to take credit for our successes while blaming failures on factors beyond our control).
Much business writing poses an even subtler problem: a failure or perhaps a reluctance to recognize that while the “whats” in business — desirable outcomes — are generic, the “hows” are particular, specific to each and every organization. It’s true, for example, that an enterprise’s strategy and organization must be “aligned,” but what that means and how to do it in this organization, with our people, right here, right now is much less obvious. Organizations are complex systems, in which cause-and-effect is nonlinear, path-dependent (history matters), and often unknowable in prospect. Deciding what to do (or not do), and how and when to do (or not do) “it,” is a matter of judgment and experience, as managers try to accomplish short-term objectives while keeping their longer run options open. As a result, consumers of business books that offer simplistic checklist-driven solutions run the risk of being trapped between one-off stories that cannot be replicated and universal principles that cannot be practiced because they are too abstract.
If they can’t tell us what to do, how can business books help in such a world? And how, in the age of 140-character tweets, disappearing SnapChat texts, and highly attenuated attention spans, can we justify spending hours, or a whole day, engaging with a 400-page volume? As a professional consumer (over the years, I have reviewed nearly 150 books for s+b), producer (I’ve written three myself), and avid fan, I can think of three principal reasons.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article
David K. Hurst, a contributing editor of strategy+business, blogs on strategy, leadership, and change here. His latest book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press, 2012).