May 16, 2008

What Is Wrong With Business Books?! - Part I

I first found out through email from my friend Sara at Cave Henricks Communications about the publication of my letter to the editors of Fast Company. Below is the full text of the letter I sent in response to Elizabeth Spiers' Library of the Living Dead essay that appeared in the April 2008 issue. I have used bold to highlight the portion they published in the magazine. I'll leave it to you to determine if their editing captured the essence of my argument:

I write to provide a needed counterpoint to Elizabeth Spiers April 2008 Not So Fast column titled "Library of The Living Dead."

I will start where she ends, agreeing in fact with Spiers' ultimate conclusion: Business books are self-help, by their very definition. The implication that business books fall strictly into the "I'm OK, You're OK" segment of self-help is where Spiers and I diverge. A book publisher recently shared research with me that showed the number one reason people buy business books is to find a solution to a problem. Sitting at the educational crossroads between "I know nothing about this," and "Let's hire a consultant," business books contain a high value proposition for the twenty dollars and two hours spent. Not, as Spiers says, to abdicate responsibility for the choices they make. Instead, it takes a great deal of personal awareness to look for answers from those who offer experiential lessons in books.

The packaging of those lessons receives the majority of criticism in Ms. Spiers column and I am always dismayed by the problems pundits have with this aspect of the industry. Human civilization is built upon stories and when an author chooses a fable as the delivery device, the writer is making the lessons more accessible to a wider audience.

The "12-step-ification" is a crutch that bloggers, business magazines, and book publishers certainly use alike, in the same way celebrity authors are used to garner attention and sell product. This is simply product marketing through concreteness and social proof.

The bestseller list as a guide to the "best" in the category is just another form of social proof. My optimism for the category would bring me to highlight Gallup's research-based StrengthsFinder 2.0 or Jim Collins' insightful and wonderful written Good to Great as evidence that some books that make the bestseller list really deserve the title.

In the case of John Kotter, we have the benefit of choosing either his current top-selling fable, or his 1996 book "Leading Change," which has sold over a million copies. Both books tackle the same content, but offer options for the reader to choose his method of consumption.

Ms. Spiers overall indictment of the entire business book category is an easy mark and one that could be applied to any genre of media. Her elitism about what constitutes good reading compounds the problem further. While I can appreciate her hyperbole as a method to communicate some criticism about the genre, a more subtle treatment of the subject would, I believe, be more effective.

Beyond that, Fast Company is a magazine that has always supported business ideas. A simplistic column like Spiers' goes against the very DNA of your publication. The mantra "WORK IS PERSONAL" matches well with Thoreau's or Emerson's definition of self-help. The publication of this column leaves me wondering just how that mission has been served.
Posted by Todd S. at May 16, 2008 2:57 PM
Comments

Todd-

I am no fan of the vast majority of business fables, but I also found Spier's essay unconvincing. What exactly is she saying about business books that isn't also (more) true of Fast Company magazine itself? FC has made use of tortured metaphors, cliches, "12-stepification," fables, and so on.

It's interesting to read the article, substituting the word magazine for book. Take a look at Spiers last paragraph with that change: "Business [magazines] let us amble zombielike through our careers, freeing us from responsibility for the quality of our own decision making. Better to delegate that responsibility to other people -- Jack Welch, perhaps... The alternative, too frightening to contemplate, is to admit that problems are usually too complex to be reduced to one-size-fits-all solutions, to train ourselves to do our own analysis, and to be a little more skeptical when the shrieking man on TV tells us to buy shares of Google right this very minute. If we can't do that, let's at least reshelve business [magazines] where they belong -- in the self-help section."

Still true?

I agree with you that books (and even business magazines) are valuable tools for "training ourselves to do our own analysis." It seems to me that FC should champion business ideas in all forms--from simple fables like Blanchard's Raving Fans to more in-depth thinking like Christensen's and Raynor's The Innovator's Solution. Both have a lot of value.

Keep up the good fight.

Posted by: Rob at May 19, 2008 1:19 PM

Brilliantly worded, cogent and eloquent! I was dismayed when I read Ms. Spier’s article. As a business "self-help" author, I am annoyed at the treatment of our genre as "less than".

Reading your letter in Fast Company pleased me. Now that I have read your original letter, I'm convinced that the editors at FC should be ashamed for editing even a word of it.

Posted by: Susan RoAne at May 28, 2008 9:13 AM
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