The Management Book Don't-Read List

Save yourself a lot of time and money, and don’t buy Management books unless they clear the rules below.

[Disclaimer: The article below is intended as a commentary on our current corporate culture, and is not aimed at any specific firm or organisation, nor do the explanations or examples refer to any company specifically. In other words, lighten up and don't take any of this personally.] 

Let’s be honest. When it comes to the management sciences, on its best days it’s a dynamic but young and imprecise science. At its worst, it’s not a science at all. Silly trends masquerade as ideas, and ideas flounder for lack of scientific frameworks to test them rigorously.

Let me save you the time and hard cash, by helping you narrow down what is not worth reading in the Management genre. I’m not stopping you from buying anything for the purposes of study, comparison, research, or just because you read a lot. Please read as much as you want. This is for those of us who don’t read a lot, and therefore have precious reading time that can’t be wasted on unprocessed garbage.

Going by the copious number of management books published each year, it would appear that there are a lot of people out there with fresh ideas and perspectives that will further our understanding of how enterprises are managed to success.

If only.

For one, a lot of the authors aren’t even management practitioners. Anyone with any thoughts about how to handle life or people is positioned as a management thought leader. Every year, unfailingly, there will be a best-seller book from a championship-winning coach, definitely a few from the military, and someone battling personal tragedy.

The part that’s really annoying is that it’s the same chocolate cake on a different plate. The star NBA coach will title his first chapter “Always believe in your people,” and the rags-to-riches home entrepreneur will have their ninth chapter titled “Have a great team, and trust them.”

Very few seem to be exploring hard topics, for example, new models of deciphering consumer behaviour or conducting economic factor analysis on corporations’ financial metrics. That’s done by tenured bow-tied academics who present these findings for each other’s pleasure in abstruse academic articles rather than for use in the real world.

Instead, bad management books usually deploy the trifecta of mediocrity — recycled lines from famous philosophers, lazy oversimplification of complex events, and ridiculously obvious ideas “inspired” from the last five such books. You can now guess half the book without ever cracking it open. I can bet my last dollar that the new book by the start-up billionaire will have a chapter on “It’s critical to listen to your customer,” and another chapter on “It’s okay to make mistakes.” Voila!

Therefore, I offer to you some filters on which management books to avoid. A book that clears them all may just be worth spending your Sundays with.

1. Avoid authorised biographies

In an autobiography, you at least have the pleasure of “hearing” the great voice directly. An authorised biography on the other hand has been thoroughly reviewed, checked, and defanged by the lead and their lawyers. What was anyway a worshipful portrait to begin with is now a templatised hagiography that whitewashes the past and all its stories, and casts the lead as someone as brilliant as Einstein and nicer than your mom.

2. Avoid anything from finance

It has been proved beyond a speck of doubt that almost all money managers are full of shit and sometimes just lucky. Their investment advice is therefore worth less than expired milk, and certainly more harmful. In any case, the best books on finance by the likes of Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, or Michael Lewis were written decades ago. The new ones just congratulate themselves on how well they fooled everyone else.

3. Avoid any book that promises great results in 30 days

Even the author of these books is laughing at how gullible you are. At best, this kind of books will provide for small improvements in your life now. These small improvements will compound to bigger changes down the road if you put in time, consistency, and discipline, in industrial quantities. So yes, you may get the great results — in a year or two. At worst, thirty days from now you’ll be anxiously wondering over a very large drink, what the hell happened last month.

4. Avoid any book by someone who has done everything

Either they’re massaging the facts a little, or they won the genetic lottery and also have lady luck as their personal cheerleader. They are fortunate to have the innate and incredible energy and talent to run a Fortune 500 company, climb Mount Everest, and raise four perfect children before they turn 40. But most of us don’t have that natural charm, resolve, or lung capacity. It is the very definition of idiotic if you expect to live the same life just by reading about what they did.

5. Avoid any book that comes out in less than a year of the author’s last release

This is clearly a cash grab. Any good book takes at least a year to write even by professional writers, who only do this for a living. Anyone who’s popping out books faster than that, which aren’t multiple parts of a series, has had a very inspiring conversation with their publisher who explained to them how they will be spending the next summer at their dream apartment in Paris.

6. Avoid any book by an executive from a famously evil firm

I can’t take names of these evil entities out of professional courtesy and fear of a legal shit-storm, but you probably know them: one of the world’s largest social media firms, a tech firm with a monopoly on your desktop, nearly every fossil fuel company, and so on. Even if these authors are not villains in the traditional sense, it says something that they were successful in a company with such a rapacious, arrogant, immoral, and inhuman work culture. And you want advice from them?

7. Avoid any book that has mindfulness or meditation as its central theme

Firstly, such books do not belong in the Business Management genre. Mindfulness is the latest example of the powerful turning a good idea into an opiate for the masses, for their own benefit. The corporate overlords have gone a step further and made it into an aspirational lifestyle. In essence, they’ve taken your dad’s simple advice to “calm down and first listen” and transformed it into a cultural tornado wrecking your self-confidence. Don’t buy the book, just listen to what your dad told you.

8. Avoid books on any trend that is less than a year old

Whatever one says about management practitioners, you have to applaud their unmatched skill at self-promotion. Simple ideas, only sometimes backed by research, get a catchy label and are soon being peddled to anyone who can be distracted by shiny objects. Only a truly useful and practical idea persists beyond a couple of years, and that’s the one you want. For now, just read the management articles, and become an informed member of your senior executive’s battle troops, on the hunt for the next big chair.

9. Avoid books by billionaires

Read these as interesting (though one-sided) life stories, but not for anything fresh by way of management wisdom. Maybe because a billion dollars is an insane amount of money, society believes that each billion endows the owner with unique wisdom. The truth is that those who have earned it from scratch either have extra-ordinary talent or extra-ordinary luck or both. Neither of those are transferable to you. Like I said, read them as unusual life stories and take their claims with a lot of salt.

10. Avoid books on recruitment or project management

Management studies are often ridiculed as common sense wrapped in a PowerPoint presentation. No one can defend these two sub-disciplines against that charge. There is very little to teach or learn here that can’t be learnt on the job or from online courses. New frameworks do keep coming up and companies take them up with the enthusiasm of a religious cult, only to realise that either it requires too much customisation and change, or that it’s the same idea they bought two years ago from those expensive consultants.

11. Avoid books that are on the discount shelf

Management tomes have a notoriously limited shelf-life and that’s mostly because current trends get outdated faster than Apple products. There’s a reason the bookshop owner has decided to forgo even their limited profits in order to get rid of this book. Nothing against discounted books in general, but the only people who buy management books on the discount shelf are the type who as children ate dirt. They clearly have a natural affinity for self-destructive stupidity and disregarding sensible advice.

12. Avoid any book by a successful CEO less than five years after their retirement

In the management world, it doesn’t take long for gods to be felled. Wait at least five years for the true story of a CEO’s success to be unearthed. That photogenic paragon of management skills looks irresistible on the hardback cover, but fight the temptation to send them your money right away. In my student days, for example, Jack Welch and Rajat Gupta were seen as gods who walked among humans. Now, even the weird homeless dude who shouts at traffic, pretends to be busy when they pass by.

Hope you enjoyed this piece. Send me your recommendations on other types of books to avoid.

As always, stay cool and keep building a better life.

Cheers!

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