For example, in "The Founders - story of PayPal" the author fawns over how great one of the Founders at PayPal was at SQL. The Founder would often jump in and fix issues alongside the admins, build dbs for features and front-end forms to populate them. The founder reduces headcount at the end of a feature build-out to reduce running costs, as maintenance wasn't important on these features. Later in the book, the company almost goes bankrupt due to the high fraud rates on the platform, specifically, they struggled with SQL-injection issues. The author doesn't manage to make the connection between these three events, but a modestly-technical reader with a critical eye can see that the company was haemorrhaging money because a Founder over-indexed on their own competency. Later, the same founder orders a ground-up rewrite of PayPal in .Net, at the dismay of his entire technical team. This almost bankrupts the company a second time, and wastes an entire fundraising round's money.
The book is presented as a kind of victory-lap, honouring the effort, grit, nous, and determination of the Founding Team. But with the right eye, the book is a case-study in how PayPal was nearly destroyed dozens of times by the competency of its Founding Team.
You can read every business book with this filter, and you get much more out of them for it.
I agree with everything you wrote up until this sentence. My takeaway was that there is nearly nothing to get out of them so I stopped reading them. With the filter on that you describe what do you ultimately get out of reading them?
As I could not help but find most of it intellectually insulting (sorry to be so blunt), I decided to give it a positive twist and review them as products themselves rather than as useful content. I wrote about how the book identified popular wishes like financial success and applied biases like appeals to authority to provide a believable path forward for the reader.
Man did he not like it, I think it was my lowest grade ever :)
While they should not be read for prescriptive purposes, they can be a font of connections to draw from if one is in the knowledge business. People like fables, stories, patterns leading to success, etc.
Good book recommendations at he end though - dry, but supplementary (also shouldn't be prescriptive!). Experience trumps all.
By far the best has been 'Managing the Design Factory' by Donald Reinertsen, which I strongly recommend to software engineering managers. I really appreciated the exploration of how organising teams and tasks impacts development speed, cost, performance and unit cost in different ways. Even though it was written in the 90s, I don't think I've seen as good a discussion on how architectural decisions impact corporate strategy.
Apparently the Mongol who butchered and enslaved the largest land area in the history of conquest, was a tolerant and forgiving leader who promoted "can-do" self-motivators and... endless honeyed BS about what a good leader is.
Nothing in the book whatsoever about the benefits of slaughtering all the male adults of newly acquired companies, and giving their wives as presents to underlings and the acquisition team lawyers. 0/10 for historical accuracy.
They of course fail to deliver on that, but don't think that makes them entirely a waste of time. As article author says "partly true".
Which is OK. I read Liars Poker because I enjoyed it, not because I'm about to be a world class bond trader
This point is flawed though, and doesn't account for the same advantage that the author ascribes to, say, Peter Thiel: being already established and having already great advantage (large amount of capital and a very recognizable and trusted brand).
The author is comparing startup companies launching an MVP (their first product) to established multi-national companies launching their 100th products 25-30+ years after being created. Quite literally apple-to-oranges (pun not intended) comparison.
btw: if you look at pictures of the Apple 1 (for example at https://www.apple1registry.com/en/71.html) you'll see a computer that's not very polished at all, because it was sold either as a kit (that you would assemble yourself) or as motherboard only.
After reading this line I question the coherence of the reasoning about other books.
BTW, the business book that helped me the most is barely known: Making Money is Killing Your Business by Chuck Blakeman.
Every now and then you encounter someone who's too busy for bullshit. Jeff Bussgang teaches a startup course at HBS and is general partner at Flybridge. His recent book The Experimentation Machine is a concise blast of information on how to do a start up right now. No self aggrandizement. A distinct lack of the personal pronoun "I." The example scenarios in the book are not cherry picked outliers meant to make a CEO or investor look good. This kind of book is remarkable for not following the business book formula.
That's remarkable, but brings up the question of then what's the intention / meaning/ why does the book exist?
I guess some authors just can afford to publish whatever they want indeed
If you are looking for a checklist of how to do a 2025 start up right, this is the book. I listened to the audiobook so I don't know the page count, but the editing is super tight.
i wonder now if -unbiased- llm based reviews could have a place for such
most reviewers are just stating what they experience/about their taste, but there's no objectivity on reviewing
