When I go to Barnes & Noble and look at the shelves and shelves of business books, the thought that comes to my head is: what a freakin’ waste of wood pulp.
A few months ago, BNET asked me to compile a list of best and worst business books. As I got into the project, though, I quickly realized that there were very few “best” and an incredible number of “worst.” That’s why I finally went with “under-rated” and “over-rated” rather than “best” and “worst.” There were just too many “worst” to choose from.
I’m reminded of the time when somebody confronted the SciFi writer Theodore Sturgeon with the observation that 90 percent of science fiction was crap. His response “90 percent of everything is crap” is legendary, but it doesn’t capture the awfulness of business books, where the number is 99 percent, if not 99.9 percent.
Here’s a good way to assess the value of business books as a genre.
If a book is valuable and useful, people will want to keep it, right? And refer to it often, right? So that means that people will want to keep them in their office library, close at hand, right?
Well, go to Amazon.com and check out the price of used business books. It’s RARE to find ANY used business book selling for more than a dollar. Many sell for a penny. That’s right. A penny.
As every sales pro knows, the monetary value of something is exactly what people are willing to pay for it.
I’m not saying there aren’t some good business books out there. Heck, many of the folk I quote in this blog have business books on the market. But still, do we really need all of this incredible self serving nonsense that’s crowding the shelves? I think not. I’ll bet you could go through your entire career in business with just two or three.
In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the protagonist returns to the (illiterate) future with three books selected from his library. Wells left it to the reader to decide which books he should have brought with him to re-educate humanity. So I’m going to make like H.G. Wells and ask my panel of experts (that’s you guys):
If you could only read three business books in your entire career, what would they be?
