While attending the Marketing SIG of SD Forum, I was struck by the topic of the talk, 12 Business Books in One Hour for the Busy CEO.   I was reminded of something that I noticed in college.  The textbooks for math and science classes were incredibly dense with information.  They needed to be read carefully so that you did not miss a single valuable sentence.  Business textbooks could often be scanned for the general gist of the topic.  I often thought that there was little editing that you could do to a technical book, but the business book could be distilled into a just a few pages with the remainder of the book as just filler with more examples than needed.  It seems that I am not the only one who has thought that some of these business books could be shortened and still retain the valuable info.  The 12 business books and their relevant info was reduced to about 12 slides. 

 One other point highlighted in the Q&A after the talk is that many of business books take old ideas and recycle them with new wording and marketing phrases. 

These extra, unneeded words do make you feel as if a great many trees were wasted.  Maybe in the future, more of these books will be available in electronic format.  That way the book can be extended by just creating some more bits. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 1:19 am and is filed under Business Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.