Business books are entertainment, not strategic tools

Perceived sameness & core takeaways

• Many commenters say there are only a handful of real “business ideas” endlessly repackaged:
  – Hard work + luck over long periods
  – Be confident and somewhat disagreeable (to avoid groupthink), but not toxic
  – Talk to customers and understand real needs
  – People and culture matter; treat them well
  – Sometimes you just get a bad hand
• After ~10–15 books, readers feel they’re mostly rereading the same themes with new anecdotes.

Survivorship bias and lack of rigor

• Books like Good to Great, Built to Last, In Search of Excellence are repeatedly criticized as survivorship-bias case studies: successful companies are profiled, principles inferred, then those companies later falter.
• Several point to Taleb-style arguments (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan) as better frameworks for thinking about success and randomness.
• General complaint: pop-business often presents hindsight narratives as if they were predictive science.

Fluff, length, and publishing incentives

• Strong consensus that many titles inflate a one-page idea into 200–300 pages with stories and repetition.
• Explanations offered:
  – Physical heft increases perceived value and price
  – People learn better via narrative and repeated examples than via bare abstractions
  – The genre is “self-help-business,” closer to Aesop-like fables than textbooks.
• Some say summaries (Blinkist, blogs, LLMs) lose the stickiness and nuance; others find full books’ padding numbing and counterproductive.

Value as inspiration, stories, and mindset

• Defenders argue these books can:
  – Help early-career readers empathize with executives and learn vocabulary
  – Provide motivation, optimism, or a “mental reset” during tough periods
  – Offer memorable stories that shape thinking more than abstract theory
• Narrative non-fiction about real companies (e.g., takeovers, failures, scandals, product histories) is widely praised as both entertaining and quietly educational.

When business books help (and which ones)

• A minority argue some titles genuinely shortcut years of trial and error, especially on operations, hiring, and management (e.g., E-Myth Revisited, The Goal, High Output Management, Venture Deals).
• Others favor textbooks, shareholder letters, and HBR-style case studies for real strategic depth, noting they’re harder to read but more actionable.

Practice vs theory and limits of advice

• Many stress that action, experimentation, and specific context dominate any generic framework; books are at best maps, not territory.
• Broad “rules” (MVPs, lean, positioning, blitzscaling) can be useful lenses but easily misapplied, especially when copied without regard to scale, industry, or era.

Genre boundaries and meta-critique

• Multiple comments note “business books” is an overloaded label: it spans pop “big idea” manifestos, memoirs, economic history, self-help, and technical how‑to. The article is seen as overgeneralizing from the weakest subgenre.
• Several accuse the piece itself of being clickbait and possibly LLM-generated, mirroring the very superficiality it criticizes.