Reading Matter Lacking Substance
When our economy was painfully gaining its market character in early 1990s, each new book on management, marketing, self-improvement – whether translated or just new – was read like the gospel. Not because it taught directly and exactly how to make money (it could be done more efficiently by intuition) but because it gave an insight into a system approach to managing a company.
As the years passed, the freshness of viewpoint was gone, of course. And there appeared an understanding that this kind of literature, with a very few exceptions, is a weak solution. First, because in the Western tradition of writing “clever” books it is customary to make them at least popular-scientific or, which is even better, absolutely popular (in the meaning of “cheesy”). Second, because the authors living in the former soviet countries have embraced the format readily and are successfully churning out books full of repetitions, examples, monotonously nauseous “plots” with feedback loops. Of course, it is easy to swallow this minty water – almost like pulp fiction. But, if we are lucky, the bottom line is labored PR abbreviations of models never applied to real life and gems a la “the blue ocean”, “bottleneck” and so on and so forth. Which are definitely metaphoric, convenient for communicating with the audience having no economic education (the one that does not know that the basic textbooks usually use the word “bottleneck” to name the major problem of a manufacturing activity). And which absolutely lack information value and can be easily substituted for with standard definitions.
However, the abundance of pop business literature does not mean that we should go to another extreme and look for the useful information in monographs. Unfortunately, they are as shallow as managerial bestsellers, though because of the senseless formal-cum-ritual criteria for the contents of this genre. While the author is cutting capers with tambourines and is trying to meet the criteria necessary for gaining a scientific degree in the future, even the most attentive reader starts losing the track of the text. And, alas, both in the world of business consulting and in the academic science of economics there are just a few of those who can pass between a rock of cheesy shallowness and a hard place of scientific ponderousness.
Practically the same situation can be encountered with the books on self-improvement. More often than not, they belong not to the management literature but to the attempts partaking of charlatanism at retelling classical or heretical concepts to narrow-minded people. These concepts are not economic but psychological, though. Or, which is diagnosed even merrier, sacred texts of various religions usually mixed in a whimsical way.
On the whole, the described situation results from a well-known tendency: today, we have to pick pearls of knowledge out of an incredibly huge muckheap of information. So, it means that it is necessary to acquire a useful skill of pragmatic treatment of literature on professional and personal growth.
Ten years ago, the famous futurist Patrick Dixon pointed out in his book “Building a Better Business. The Key to Marketing, Management and Motivation” that one of the basic skills of an efficient manager of the early third millennium is to look through 100 pages in half an hour and to summarize their basic ideas. As a rule, it is easy to do considering a low concentration of thoughts per unit of business or self-improvement text. And sometimes, if you are very lucky, you can still find a pearl when scanning a fresh managerial piece. This pearl deserves reading attentively and worthy ideas deserve noting. In my recent practice, I have come across about five books of the kind.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1374939-vodyanistoe-chtivo
Tags: Books