The Cynic’s Guide to Reading Business Books
How to get the most out of CEO biographies and business tomes — and not just the lessons they want to teach you
The book begins in medias res, at a moment of high tension. The author, a middle-aged journalist writing for a prestige business publication but worried about his financial future in an age of declining circulation and endless job cuts, quickly describes the protagonist. Musing on the lucrative speaking gigs available to a New York Times bestselling author, he establishes what his protagonist has at stake; as he outlines the consequences of failure, he inwardly cringes at the thought of the cost of a Park Slope apartment and an also-in-Park-Slope preschool.
With a second, much shorter paragraph, the stage is set: the prototypical business book has begun.
— Catchphrase: The Wild, Improbable Story of a Company Whose Hype Cycle Hopefully Peaks Right Around Our Expected Publication Date
I’ve read a lot business profiles. Successes, failures, frauds, fads, financial engineers — anyone who turned a little money into a lot or a lot into a little. And some of these profiles, the book industry decides, are worthy of the roughly 300-page treatment.
