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No, business books sell well because of the fantasy aspect. Business books are overwhelmingly bad - and still sell - because it's very difficult to verify anyt

No, business books sell well because of the fantasy aspect. Business books are overwhelmingly bad - and still sell - because it's very difficult to verify anything said empirically. Most of the time, business isn't treated as a science (a mistake), and a lot of business books are written by people who are good salesmen, but not much else. Good business books are very rare. They don't have marketing titles like "small is the new big", they don't feature the author's face on the front cover (where else but ego-centric business books does that happen?) and they don't endorse moronic checkbox routines like "Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. ". Seth Godin is very much a junk author.

davidw 18y ago
A science? I'm dubious. Too many factors to treat it very scientifically, or be able to repeat 'experiments'. Maybe there's room for some of that approach, but... it seems way too full of squishy human factors to get all that scientific about it. > Good business books are very rare. Any titles come to mind?
- calpaterson 18y ago
  You can't do experiments very easily, but it's easy to examine empirically historical events. As for good business books, I suppose I would "recommend" psychology, probably Dale Carnegie (thought it's the odd one out) and most traditional texts on finance and economics. I would say business is a mixture of economics, finance and psychology, in that order.
notauser 18y ago
I have been sitting management accounting exams for fun. (Well, really to keep in study mode - half an hour a night every night is maintainable - unless you stop, then restarting is hard.) I would highly recommend them to programmers. Because the maths is frankly trivial for anyone with an engineering or CS degree the textbooks are easy enough to skim, and once you have digested them they give you a solid theoretical basis to attack business problems. Understanding cost and revenue behavior may not be as sexy as making people stand up in meetings, but it's a damn sight more useful. At the very least it can give you a hint about which people you should make stand up.
- otoburb 18y ago
  Works for me.

davidw 18y ago

A science? I'm dubious. Too many factors to treat it very scientifically, or be able to repeat 'experiments'. Maybe there's room for some of that approach, but... it seems way too full of squishy human factors to get all that scientific about it. > Good business books are very rare. Any titles come to mind?

calpaterson 18y ago
You can't do experiments very easily, but it's easy to examine empirically historical events. As for good business books, I suppose I would "recommend" psychology, probably Dale Carnegie (thought it's the odd one out) and most traditional texts on finance and economics. I would say business is a mixture of economics, finance and psychology, in that order.

notauser 18y ago

I have been sitting management accounting exams for fun. (Well, really to keep in study mode - half an hour a night every night is maintainable - unless you stop, then restarting is hard.) I would highly recommend them to programmers. Because the maths is frankly trivial for anyone with an engineering or CS degree the textbooks are easy enough to skim, and once you have digested them they give you a solid theoretical basis to attack business problems. Understanding cost and revenue behavior may not be as sexy as making people stand up in meetings, but it's a damn sight more useful. At the very least it can give you a hint about which people you should make stand up.

otoburb 18y ago
Works for me.