The Narcissism of Narratives
Or: Why I Hate Business Books
Why is every business book so awful? No, really, why are they so consistently bad? I’m a binge reader, and this past week alone I’ve been reading somewhere between 2 and 3 books a day — the one constant in this endeavour is that books about business are consistently terrible.
But before I do that, I’d like to break down the standard format of a business book — its contents, its structure, and what the raison d’être of most books in this genre seems to be.
The Anatomy of a Business Book
The experts are wrong. What gets passed down from experts to the modern businessman is less wisdom and more discarded, malformed chunks of knowledge that don’t accurately reflect the reality of running a business.
A business book is here to change that. With decades of experience, rising from the lowliest worker to the CEO of the company, the author will tell you their hard-earned lived experience that flies in the face of what these so-called “experts have told you”.
A humble recounting of the author’s life story that in no way inflates their ego comprises the first chapter, but don’t worry: charming anecdotes from the author’s life that perfectly punctuate their little nuggets of wisdom will be spread throughout the rest of the book, because business is all about storytelling, yeah?
Here’s my little secret: You need to work hard. You need to hustle, and grind, and never stop believing in yourself. I’ve seen too many people give up on their ambitions because they couldn’t take the heat — and that’s ok, I understand. But you, dear reader, are different. You have the same passion I did at your age, and I’m here to teach you what no one else will — because they’re scared of how far you’d go.
If the author is particularly erudite, they may point towards a little fellow named Daniel Kahneman. Humans aren’t rational, you see. Sometimes seeing pictures of the elderly makes people walk slower. We are who we surround ourselves with, and the work of Kahneman is proof of this fact.
If they’re even more academic-savvy, they may refer to a little thing called cognitive biases. You might not have heard of them — they’re a little far afield from mainstream discussion, but here’s a quick crash course. An example of Bayes rule is followed by a reference to a 2005 psychological study about laypersons unable to accurately tell you the percent likelihood a woman has breast cancer given a positive screening — probably because they have not yet been enlightened by Bayes.
A restatement of the book’s principal thesis — a significantly watered down version of their title and subtitle — is then followed by one last anecdote that serves to accentuate their final ask: that you carry this advice with you into a successful career as a mid-level manager. Or as you like to call it, pre-C Suite.
A Modest Clarification
That was a bit too much fun to write. I may have exaggerated here or there, but believe I am mostly correct in general. Too often I see books with big, provocative titles, glowing NYT reviews, and all the pomp and circumstance of a rockstar’s album drop — only to be disappointed when I find myself skimming through 75% of the pages that are littered with useless anecdotes.
The other constant I see in business books is that no one brings data. Ok, maybe not no one, but far too few. There’s an over-reliance on anecdote to prove a point, instead of proving one’s theories in the usual way. I suppose to the authors of these books, they’ve lived through the application of these tricks — it must seem self evident that their advice is true. But the rest of us don’t have that. To me, this sort of anecdotal retelling is akin to a fan of acupuncture excitedly telling me that “acupuncture cured my cold”! I’m sure that’s what they think, but I still don’t believe them.
This brings me to my great gripe with business books: Storytelling
Storytelling: Over-applied
Business is all about storytelling. This has been beaten into my head since day one of my own business degree. Storytelling convinces people, it draws them in, it entices them to buy your product. This is, however, a recommendation most useful in marketing oneself and ones products — not in the dissemination of knowledge.
Storytelling is like a dark art. Sure, you can convince people of something by telling a really really good story, but should they be convinced? As I’m fond of saying: the plural of anecdote is not data. Trying to convince me that your particular managerial style works is very much a “put up or shut up” situation. No matter how heart-wrenching your tale or inspirational your message, I want to know if what you’re telling me works empirically. This is because of a little thing called survivorship bias.
As a brief digression, I’d like to bring you back to the subject of World War 2 airplanes (I suspect some of you already know where I’m going with this). The statistician Abraham Weld was trying to figure out how to minimize the loss-rate of allied planes during the war. He’d compiled the data of the planes that returned from dogfights and ended up with a graph not dissimilar from this:
The greatest concentration of shots seemed to be around the centre and edges of the wings — with a few more at the tail. The US military believed the correct solution would be to put additional armour on the areas hit most often. Weld disagreed. He, and others in his research group, believed the most appropriate areas to add additional protection were the middle of the wings and the middle of the tail — precisely the area where the fewest planes had hits. Why? Because the planes hit there didn’t come back. The data the military used was based off all the planes that had been shot and survived. If anything, the areas with the greatest number of recorded shots were the safest places to be hit, because evidently a pilot could manage to land safely afterwards.
By not realizing the biased nature of their data, the US military was prepared to enact changes that would solve the exact opposite of the problem they truly faced.
Let’s come back to business books — how do we know our data isn’t biased? Just kidding, it totally is. The authors of business books tend to primarily extract from their own personal experiences as the CEOs of big companies. The dirty secret of the corporate world is that ascending to such a high level is as much about being in the right place at the right time than it isn about one’s skill level relative to other candidates. Corporate politics are messy, complicated, and often work without rhyme or reason — the ascension of any individual to the C Suit is better understood as an emergent property of the firm’s social systems than any particular philosophy they may hold towards management.
I’m sure you can think of many people entirely unqualified for the positions they hold. You may be working for one. Heck, you may be that person. Regardless, you’d feel pretty weird if one of those incompetent but lucky individuals came forward with a book detailing how their one-weird-trick got them to where they are today. Why give CEO’s and other top executives a pass? They’re human just like the rest of us — they just make a whole lot more money.
The Real Reason Business Books are Bad
But of course I’m deluding myself. I’ve been operating under the assumption that the purpose of a business book is to disseminate knowledge — that its reason for existence is to generate material benefit for its readers by making them smarter, or at least adding to their mental toolbox.
In reality, I have a sneaking suspicion the value generated by a business book is less in the knowledge it contains, and more in the social status it confers upon its readers. Sure, maybe you really enjoyed reading Warren Buffet’s biography — I did, for what it’s worth — but a significant subset of Snowball’s readership, I expect, don’t particularly care about the life of Buffet or his investment philosophy. No, the point is to be seen reading a book about Warren Buffet’s life and investment philosophy, and that difference matters.
A business book jam-packed full of data may sell some copies, but if your primary goal is to look good, who needs all that extra work? It’s much easier to lazily skim over a mildly entertaining anecdote about a particularly momentous golf game than a subtle argument about the statistical analysis of different managerial styles. The product being sold is the status of having bought the product. You better make your book entertaining so people don’t think it’s too much effort to even pick it up.
Towards Honesty
I should clarify that I have nothing against this style of business book in abstract. There’s nothing morally objectionable about them. The only irritating part of a business book is that it pretends to not be one. Anodyne theories about “telling a story” or “leading with compassion” are trumped up as thrilling, disruptive, groundbreaking accounts of what business should become. Maybe they’re right — but did you really need 300 pages to say what could be summarized in 5? I thought not.