Do All Business Strategy Books Suck?

30 April 2009 | Community, Culture, Eventness, Internet, Marketing, Media, Online Writing, Personal, Politics, Social Media, TV & Movies | Comments

Earlier today, my friend Brian Reich unleashed a Twitter stream (later gathered into this blog post) in which he argued that all business strategy books are useless and asked the online universe to change his mind.

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks