How to Find “Good” Business Books
As it is the day after New Years, I reflected my reading journey and became so deeply afflicted1 by the fact that I haven’t read a share of good business books. But there was another problem. The field of business are different than the books related to the term “business”, which are usually written in appeal to the “pop-business” audience. That is the current literature that you get when searching top business books on Amazon discusses the practical virtues of a business person, the surface-level psychology (probably on the “grindset”), and broad organizational “stuff”. There is good content there, but it felt like there was something off, no way business as a field is just this.
So based off my intuition, I decided to do some research on if business was more than that. The answer is yes. Business as a field is so much more than the books people tout or advertise with the sort of 3D rendered, really visually uninteresting book covers2. Business as a field also covers topics like theory of institutional actors (firms, markets, consumers, etc.), organizational efficiency, market analysis, ethics and probably more. Though, the critique here is that you would be better off studying to be an economist, sociologist/anthropologist, or even philosopher as the “good” books: The Theory of Industrial Organization, Democratizing Innovation, Organizational Culture and Leadership, and so on is never assigned in an undergraduate business degree; maybe an MBA. The most you would engage with these books are having their ideas referenced in HBR articles the professor assigns and I think that is a shame.
The GBB Metric
My solution then is this, the GBB Metric. GBB being Good Business Book. I mean it is a pretty simple metric. I define it as the ratio of citations to Amazon or Goodreads reviews a book has. The rationale being that the “hidden gems” are vetted by the academic business community in direct contrast to the public receival of a book. For example, Thinking Fast and Slow would be ~50,000/500,000 which is 2 magnitudes “gooder” than 48 Laws of Power at 500/200,000. A “time-tested” book like Competitive Strategy would be higher than both at 75,000/15,000. Though, I do admit that this is just a heuristic and that it is probably not even the best one at that. However, with that in mind, go out there and read some books. Thanks for reading.