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I am always amazed how most business book authors take a simple idea that could be described in one page, and turn it into a 200+ page book with popularizing na
by abetaha 1y ago
I am always amazed how most business book authors take a simple idea that could be described in one page, and turn it into a 200+ page book with popularizing narrative. What's more amazing is that the ideas are usually commonsense, but due to human nature are seldom practiced.
- jeron 1y agoNaval has said most books could be essays and most essays could be tweets
- dmos62 1y agoWhat could tweets be?
- meekaaku 1y agoemoji
- BlueTemplar 1y agoInsert lazy joke about how the whole of Xitter could be condensed into a single poo emoji. EDIT : Something related but slightly less wasteful of your time : Carmen by Stromae : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU
- plemer 1y ago</joke>
- delian66 1y ago.
- tiffanyh 1y agoI’d say most books period, not just business books - could be shortened to just a couple of pages.
- prewett 1y agoSure, but at some point you miss something. You could summarize “The Lord of the Rings” as “Frodo journeys with much effort to destroy the One Ring at Mt. Doom, but in the end claims it himself and Gollum accidentally destroys it for him.” But the book is far more than plot. “The Iliad” is basically “Achilles gets insulted and sits out the battle, while everyone else tries to win everlasting glory through bravery until Achilles finally has had enough and kills Hector.” But nobody is going to be reading that summary for 2500 years.
- econ 1y agoI'm not much of a book reader. Someone told me that if they follow the style guide you only have to read the first sentence of each chapter. It was kinda mind blowing to read a bunch of example books he gave me. The funniest part was returning to a previous book to read more of one of the chapters. I apparently didn't know how [those] books work.
- Propelloni 1y agoThere is an old chestnut in scientific publishing: "Say what you are going to say, say it, say what you have said." This extends beyond the paragraph. You can get very far by reading the table of contents, the introduction and the conclusion of a scientific book. Dive in only if you need details or quotes ;)
- plemer 1y agoNot exclusive to scientific publishing, either. Minto’s Pyramid Principle is a classic in strategy consulting and includes this structure. Have slso heard it called “triple coat”.
- Propelloni 1y ago"Triple coat" is nice. I like it!
- alphazard 1y agoAs I see it there are 2 likely reasons for this. 1. You need enough paper to create an object with a noticeable mass that takes time to work all the way through. Too small or short and it doesn't feel worth it. Make it short enough and people could read it in the book store. 2. People are bad at applying a crystalized abstraction in day-to-day life. They are better at learning narratives and fitting the current situation to the closest learned narrative, and then acting out the part of the protagonist. Instead of explaining a statistic or explicit rule of thumb, it would be more effective to give a bunch of examples where someone successfully applies the rule and is rewarded. Those examples can take up many pages.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ldoughty 1y agoPoint 1 is a good example of the GEICO jingle. People felt 5-10 minutes isn't enough time for something as serious as insurance.. but 25-30 is so long it turns people away... And then 5%, maybe even 10% savings isn't enough to go through the effort, but 25% seems unrealistic.... You need a document long enough to seem informative and authoritative without being too extreme in any way... Then you can slap a price on it and call it a book!
- itake 1y agoMany non-fiction books, you can get the gist by reading a blogger's summary, but I think the length of the book actually gives my brain time to digest and commit to permanent memory the idea(s) in the book. Reading a 3 minute summary, once, I will easily forget the knowledge. But reading about the idea with different stories and other auxiliary information help me retain the principles much faster.
- slt2021 1y agoIts not only the idea, but the history, and analysis of the author. Reading a book is not just “downloading a knowledge into your brain”. Reading is more like executing a program and seeing dofferent result in dofferent people. People will reflect in a different way and come out with different takes, emphasize points, lessons, and takeaways
- ghaff 1y agoIt's the way the publishing industry works. There may be an article or possibly two or three articles with case studies, etc. but a published book needs to be 250 pages or so. I really felt like I was fluffing up a book when I went through a publisher. For the second edition I felt it was a bit better as I trimmed some stuff and added a dedicated chapter with a legal co-worker. But it's downside to working through a publisher. Probably won't do it again and have self-published other shorter works.
- bdangubic 1y ago“7 habits…” made an empire from 7 common-sense things in a book form :)
- monkeyelite 1y agoI actually think that's one of the better ones - not in terms of business, but personal/family organization. Have you read it? Spoilers: it's not a list of 7 tricks to put in your daily schedule.
- bdangubic 1y agough it was mandatory read at a place I did my internship looooong time ago :) read the 8th habit out of curiosity what can that be that deserves an entire book by itself
- codeproject 1y agoThe writer's children actually inherited his empire and even wrote a book called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. I always wondered—if the original book was so powerful and effective, wouldn't the greatest beneficiaries be his own kids? With their father's guidance and the principles from the book, they should have achieved remarkable success. After all, you can't find a better coach than that, and it's hard to beat such a winning combination. Yet, the result is that his child ended up making a living by writing a book telling others how to succeed—rather than demonstrating that success firsthand.
- monkeyelite 1y agoSean: > He later earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. Covey was the starting quarterback on BYU's football team during the 1987 and 1988 seasons, where he led his team to two bowl games > Covey worked at Deloitte and Touche consulting in Boston, followed by Trammel Crow Ventures in Dallas. Stephen junior: > He received an MBA from Harvard Business School > He is the father of NFL wide receiver and return specialist Britain Covey.
- rolfkip 1y ago
- BenFranklin100 1y agoSometimes that is true, yes. It’s also true that programmers/engineers often don’t do nuance outside their field. A extremely bright classmate who was an engineer swore it was a waste of time to read anything other than the headlines in newspapers. The actual article was unnecessary repetitive fluff. What is seen as window dressing, is often essential tapestry that provides context.
- ekianjo 1y agoLess true nowadays since the headlines are made for attention grabbing and bear no relationship with the content.
- tomrod 1y agoHow to win friends and influence people remains one of the better ones. Most of its chapters are only a handful of pages.
- hammock 1y agoThat is not a business book
- ListeningPie 1y agoWhat is a business book? For example I’ve seen “The Art of War” listed as business book.
- levocardia 1y agoYes it is, almost all of the examples in the book are about business situations!
- tomrod 1y agoI recommend giving it a read, it is clearly a business book.
- WheelsAtLarge 1y agoThat's the rule for writing books. I don't know about now, but it used to be that "Learn to" computer books were 1000+ pages. A group of programmers would get together and write mostly useless chapters each and put them all into one book. The book became a best seller simply because buyers thought they were getting a bargain. It's the same for business books. A 30-page book won't sell, but a 250 one is a best seller.
- begueradj 1y agoYou often need to explain the same idea from different perspectives because you don't know your audience.
- NeutralCrane 1y agoThis is my issue as well, not just with business books, but self-help in general. Many have a premise that might be helpful or at least interesting. But almost none of them require more than a blog post to fully explore. The expansion to a full book length is almost never worth it and is solely for the author to monetize the idea.
- alabastervlog 1y agoThe entire broad genre of self-help + business has a reputation for being scam-adjacent for a reason. It’s pretty much all junk. Even the ones people say are “good” (people keep writing them because they can sell, which means some become popular, which are the “good” ones, but usually they aren’t good)
- marcosdumay 1y agoSome of them do have a page worth of valuable content; some have a page worth of misleading content that is worse than nothing; and most don't have any content. The first set is supposed to be the "good" ones, but a lot of people will add books from the second set there too.
- dmos62 1y agoYou need time/repetition for new information to sync in. The time needed is inversely proportional to how familiar you are with the subject. For example, I just said what I wanted to say, but now I'll repeat it in another way, because that will make it more accessible: if I already know imperative programming and some logic (?), my absorption of a new related subject - logic programming will be faster; if the most related thing I know is setting the alarm clock on my bedside, the absorption rate will be low and I'll need a lot of learning material for it to sink in.
- levocardia 1y agoI'm more empathetic to the "stretch out the simple idea" approach since I realized that there's basically no way to monetize or productize a concise but useful idea. If I read a really great tweet about doing creative work, I'd probably forget it in a day or two. But if I have a friend who's struggling with creative work, I can just give him a copy of The War of Art and there's a much higher chance it will "catch" (and Pressfield pockets a few well-earned dollars too). And for what it's worth, The War of Art does very little stretching.
- mmoskal 1y agoMy understanding is that printing 300 page paperback costs like $2 while 50 pages cost $1.50. However you can clearly claim way more money for the 300 pages so publishers are not interested in short books, business or otherwise.
- motoxpro 1y agoDoesn't that describe most good ideas in life? Things that are commonsense (especially after the fact), simple, seldomly well practiced because of human nature, and can be communicated in a few paragraphs but take years to understand? Kindness, democracy, business, performance in sport, scientific method etc. I don't know one good idea that can't be communicated in a page or less.
- fifilura 1y agoWhy do you think it is not possible? Of course it is hard work to distill something complex, but I have some naive intuition that it would actually be possible.
- lazyasciiart 1y agoI think you misunderstood the comment.
- xivzgrev 1y ago“It works” is a rare example where the author deliberately kept the book short. I don’t recall how many pages it is but you can read whole thing in only 10 min or so.
- serial_dev 1y agoWhile I agree that many of these books are inflated from 5 pages to 250 on purpose so that they can sell a book, it is sometimes useful to hear an idea multiple times, with examples and explanations as to why that idea is important. I’m not sure all those details can be included in a 5 paragraph ChatGPT summary. I find it extremely annoying in books, but I don’t mind it at all with audiobooks, it drives the point home and makes you think about the idea and how you could apply it in your own life while you are going for a walk or doing the dishes.
- raincole 1y agoBusiness books (and self-help books) had been ChatGPTing before ChatGPT was invented.
- georgeecollins 1y agoIts because lots of non-fiction books start as articles, talks, essays, papers or blogs. Ideas that could be expressed in twenty pages or an hour talk get elaborated into books because books are the medium that sells. In the old days people wrote and sold pamphlets!
- 2b3a51 1y agoI was hoping that ebooks, print on demand, self-publishing and such would lead to a new age of pamphleteering. But it didn't happen like that.
- PeterStuer 1y agoBecause nobody bought the one page for $29.95 at the airport in days people still bought paper books.
- Alex_001 1y ago[dead]
- marsten 1y agoLength is 100% marketing. There is no commercial market for 15-20 page essays, which would be the ideal length for a lot of business books. (The famous Harvard Business Review cases are typically this long.) The reason many business books feel fluffy is that these 15-20 pages of solid content are spread over 300 pages to meet the expectations of readers and booksellers.
- jonathanstrange 1y agoYou forgot the first 2 chapters whose purpose is to lay out with anecdotes how everybody does it wrong because they don't follow that one insight and argue that anyone who criticizes the book has the wrong mindset for being a successful entrepreneur.
- abanana 1y agoThe same formula seems to be common to all the "popular X" genres (science, psychology, etc), and has been for years. The Selfish Gene followed it. So do Malcolm Gladwell's books - the last one of his I read, I had to restrain myself from throwing at the nearest wall in frustration at his nonsense.
- koliber 1y agoWould you believe me and would you immediately start following the advice if I told you that the key to a healthy life is "Surround yourself with meaningful relationships, sleep well, eat well, exercise, don't drink alcohol, and don't smoke"? I don't know you but there's a good chance that you're not doing all of those things. There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice. There's a small chance that simply hearing those condensed words will change your behavior. To change how we think and act we need good stories. This is what books are, including these business books. Good stories that take a simple idea and wrap it in anecdotes, justification, shock value, and entertainment so that they stick in your head and perhaps convince you to act in a certain way, at least sometimes.
- foobahhhhh 1y agoStories sure ... and I need to know how to do each of those things! Where "I" is a million people with different knowledge and backgrounds and health conditions and ages converging to the book.
- eadmund 1y ago> Would you believe me and would you immediately start following the advice if I told you that the key to a healthy life is "Surround yourself with meaningful relationships, sleep well, eat well, exercise, don't drink alcohol, and don't smoke"? > There's also a good chance that you will agree with the above advice. I just want to note that I do not agree with the above advice. Tobacco and alcohol in moderation are key parts of a healthy life. Abstention is neurotic and thus unhealthy.
- sgarland 1y agoYou are the first person I have ever seen argue that tobacco in moderation is healthy. Quite the claim.
- arcanemachiner 1y agoI have a friend who has claimed, on multiple occasions, that soda pop protects your teeth because the acid kills the bacteria. So, you know, these ideas are out there.
- kristofferR 1y agoIt's easy to summarize business books, even ChatGPT can probably summarize all the major ones just from its internal knowledge, but you'll likely not internalize any of the knowledge if you don't read the whole thing. The narrative might not matter that much by itself, but they'll make you remember the main points of a book. I tried Blinkist (audio book summary service), but after listening to 20 summaries, I think I would have learnt more by just reading 1 book in full.
- seanhunter 1y agoThe funniest example of that is the book "Essentialism", which is about the idea that you should distill things down to what is essential and do only that, which he states on page 1 and 2 and then fails spectacularly to do by repeating himself for another 150 or so entirely redundant pages.