Are Business Books Really Useful?

I like to read since young and started with fiction (big fan of Enid Blyton, if anyone remembers). I swap to non-fiction during my undergraduate days, as I need to get myself updated and also equip myself with business skills. Obviously, my favorite genre was business books. I was devouring a lot of business books and spend a lot my time reading in the university business library

After a while, there was a “hollow” feeling. With each business books that I read, while there are some solutions provided but I constantly has this nagging feeling that something does not make much sense. This is also true when I was reading books on Analytics in business that is written by Knowledge Management expert, Thomas Davenport.

As I proceed in my analytics and AI career journey, I realised that each business is different. How so? The business model, revenue model, market access, supply chain, go-to-market strategy (to name a few, that is the tip of the iceberg) etc are different! What does it mean?

Given that business books are written for the general management, from middle to top management from various industries and business, they can only provide very general solutions or at the most, tailored to the industry. Secondly, in order to score any research and consulting work, the books are written in a way that shows a variety of solutions. Last but not least, the solutions provided while it may take a few statements to describe but once the rubber hits the road, while the solution MAY BE feasible and actionable but can take a lot of effort and time to execute and achieve the desired results i.e. reading a few statements takes a few minute, executing the solution may take days and months. How many management personnel has the luxury of time to execute these solutions?

Now if you put compare business books with ChatGPT or Google Gemini or perhaps a “Management GPT”, we probably have to start asking ourselves if management need to buy (mostly expensive) and spend time to read business books to keep themselves updated. The value-to-dollar ratio may not justify the need for business books anymore and may strangle one of the revenue source of universities’ publishing houses.

So is reading business books still useful to level up our business management skills? What is your thoughts?

These days I read a lot more on neuroscience related to human intelligence, AI’s impact on society and daily mathematics application and history. If you have come across any interesting books in these areas, please share them in the comments below! :)

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