In a recent post for the First Friday Book Synopsis website, Randy Mayeux observes:

“I’ve read business books for decades, and presented synopses of many of them for nearly 16 full years. You know what? There is not all that much new in the best [business] books.”

It’s true that most of the core business issues remain the same: “Who is our customer? What is our core business? How can we increase sales and profits?”

However, the competitive marketplace continues to change constantly because of all manner of disruptive inventions and innovations. For example: the printing press, refrigeration, the internal combustion engine, electricity, mass production, steam power, telegraph and then the telephone, pressurized interiors in aircraft, the computer, and the Internet/WWW.

More recently, Big Data, MRI, Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) learning, metacognition, predictive analytics, subliminal motivation, and the impact of the emotions and the subconscious mind on decision making.

Business strategies and tactics have had to change to accommodate the challenges and opportunities created by these and other disruptive inventions and innovations.

What to do and how to it?

Dating back at least to Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), business thinkers have helped executives to answer those questions…and the answers in recent years have changed almost monthly, sometimes weekly and even daily.

By the way, Peter Drucker gratefully acknowledged Fowlett as the “prophet of management.” Warren Bennis called her a “swashbuckling advance scout of management thinking.” Rosabeth Moss Kanter suggested that reading Follett was “like entering a realm of calm in a sea of chaos. Her work reminds us…there are truths about human behavior that stand the test of time. They persist despite superficial changes, like the deep and still ocean beneath the waves of management fad and fashion.”

Drucker, Bennis, Kanter, Michael Porter, Jim Collins, Clayton Christensen, Gary Hamel, and Tom Davenport suggest new ways to think about those truths that “stand the test of time” as well as new ways to apply lessons to be learned from them.

The statement “There is not all that much new in the best [business] books today” will come as quite a surprise to them as well as to other authors of recently published books, especially those that share breakthrough revelations from new research.

If Mayeux is correct, there is no need to read books (or even synopses) because there is not much new to learn.

I strongly disagree. What do you think?