How to pick a good management book

A Business Week article last year mentioned that 11,000 management books are published each year (here). I can't believe this number, but even 1,100 books per year would be a lot. Thinking about it, even 110 books are too many too read. Actually, 11 business books are probably also too many to read in a year. So should you even bother reading management books? Nassim Taleb (on his third book, see below) concludes "I don't read business books and I almost never talk to anyone who reads them". In fact, this sentiment is common even among many managers. Personally, I think a good target for most of us is to read one to three business books per year. With such a limited target you need to do quite a bit of research before you decide what to read. Your time is valuable.



First, you need to be able to spot the really bad books. There are a number of bad formulas you should be aware of:

• The author has an ulterior motive. The book is primarily written as a marketing tool for the author's consulting company. One approach is just to write down only a third of the required information and hope the readers will buy consulting services. Another approach is to write a bunch of generalities because the author does not have anything better to write. The hope here is that the potential consulting clients actually do not read the book, but instead take the fact that a book has been published as a proxy for the author's knowledge.
• Good article, but bad book. The book is a book length treatment of what would have been one or two very good articles. Unfortunately, there is no way to charge for one article, so the authors are forced to write a book. Harvard Business Review Press is a master of this formula. First they publish an article in Harvard Business Review and then a book follows. During the last 15 years this has become a frequent formula used by both unknown and known authors. .
• Serial author. The author is on his fifth, or tenth, or twentieth management book. It is impossible to have something new to say after five books. The content will be a rehash and update of previous material. Personally, I would start to be worried when the author publishes his third management book. 
• Textbooks. A naive reader might think that a textbook will give an understanding of the field. Nothing could be further from the truth. Textbooks typically include a lot of models to make all professors (potentially adopting the book) happy, but the large amount of models means that none of them can be explained in detail. Instead confusion and boredom rules. Poor students that have to read them!
• Big font size, wide margins, or generous line spacing. This is another warning sign that the author really does not have much to say. 
• Be careful of co-authored books. As a general rule, more authors make the book worse. There are exceptions when a pair can write a really good book. However, be careful when there is more than on author, especially when more than two authors.

Unfortunately, the publisher is no longer a good proxy for quality. In the 1980s, The Free Press, published few but pretty good management books. HBS Press has during the last 25 years also stared to publish everything that moves. Riding on the brand name this publisher is not reliable at all. So do not let the muscles of publishing houses determine what you read. There are probably a few smaller publishers that consistent publish junk, but you will avoid those by following the guidelines in this blog post.

Stay away from buying books in the above categories. There is no need to feed authors' bad habit of writing books. Second, still need to pick what book to read. Here are some further guidelines:

• Buy books that are the results of ten or twenty years of the author's research or work. It does not matter whether the author is an academic or a practitioner, what matters is how much work the author has put into the book. Almost anyone who has focused ten years of his life on something could write an interesting book. Clayton Cristensen wrote a great book on innovation in 1995 based on his research. Subsequently, he published several books books that were restatements of his earlier work, but without the academic rigour.
• Maybe the author does not have any or much published research, then you must look for skin in the game. If the author considers his book path breaking and then he uses the standard old-dry case studies, then the underlying message is that the book is just a me-too book. Or if the academic uses student reports for the book. If the professor really thought that his book was path breaking he would actually do much further research on the companies.  
• Do not buy any book without researching the author. Check Amazon (especially the negative reviews) and Wikipedia (if the author is well known); and find the youtube clips of the author. Does he seem to know his subject, or is he a bullshitter? Reading a book takes valuable time in possession. You do not want to waste your time with a bullshitter. 
• Buy the author's first or second book even if they are 5, 10 or 20 years old. Never buy her latest book in the airport. Get the book second hand if it is no longer in print. The world does not change as fast as some people believe. Peter Drucker wrote a book in 1954 and it still feels modern. That's amazing! Drucker was insightful but he was not a lone star, but I don't know of any other 1950s book that managers can (and do) read today!
• Ask people for advice of the best books they have read. If you trust the person, you can trust their advice. Ask why the person recommends the book. Be sure to ask people that are different from yourself otherwise you just get recycled advice.
• Don't be afraid to throw away books. If after reading three chapters you consider the book pretty bad, do not put it back in the book shelf. Throw it away. And of course, do not give it to a friend!

Third, once you have mastered the two steps above, you also need to start paying attention to the scope of what you read. There is a tendency to be too narrow in your reading. If you like innovation, you will read too many books about innovation. Widen your reading by including books on strategic management, marketing, the Chinese economy, the history of the industrial revolution, etc. If you read narrowly, your brain will become narrow. Let me elaborate with another example. If you like strategic management you could always read Michael Porter, Gary Hamel, Chan Kim, and some other books that are mainstream strategy books. Fine, but make sure you broaden yourself:

• Lean start-ups. This is a practical movement and there are several manuals of how to start a lean business published.
• Business model innovation. Big after the Internet crash in 2000 and now becoming mainstream strategy. But still innovation people write about this.
• Marketing strategy. Big in thr 1970s but still some around.
• Management accounting. There was a movement called activity-based costing in the 1990s that did not result in much, but the ideas are extremely relevant for strategy
• Mergers & acquisition. Some of the stuff written in finance is also relevant for strategy.
• Some individuals in academic sociology. This is a field that is not very scholarly. Instead most academics in this field want to change society towards the left. However, there are a few interesting author in this domain as well.
• Business history. The study of the telegraph (a network) was very popular in the late 1990s when Internet (another network) was bubbling
• Biographies. You can learn by reading good biographies. Bezos, Jobs, Lutz, and there are others. But beware of the ego that just want to write their own epitaph. 
• Military history. Companies battling in the market place and armies battling have similarities and especially valid in industries where competitors are very stable, ie you have competed with mostly the same competitors for decades. Then the military similarities could be valuable.

I think you get the idea. If you like reading do not read more of the same. Diversify!