Dave Pollard’s list of The 12 Best Business Books of 2005 is worth taking a look at. I’ll definitely be checking at least some of them out.
What really struck me about his review, though, was the summary at the end of the post (emphasis is mine):
In general, it was another disappointing year for books about business. The lack of imagination and courage among book publishers seems to be endemic, and the approach seems almost formulaic — give us a big name cult-of-leadership CEO and let’s bask in his wisdom, or give us a book about some intriguing new management theory, but make sure it sounds like it’s been thoroughly tested out in the real world by dropping the names of familiar Fortune 500 companies who allegedly have deployed this theory — even if they really haven’t. When will publishers, and business book buyers, realize that there are no guarantees, best practices or cookie-cutter implementation methodologies for anything? We should read books to get interesting and useful ideas, and then draw upon our courage and the wisdom of crowds — our employees and customers especially — to decide which ideas to pursue, experiment with them, and then decide how to implement them in the unique context of our own organizations.
tagged as: Books, Business, Publishing
no straight lines 