There was a period — maybe two or three years — when I read business books the way some people train for marathons. Deliberately, systematically, with the belief that enough accumulated knowledge would produce some kind of competitive advantage. I had a Notion database of highlights. I could drop “Blue Ocean Strategy” into a client conversation without flinching.
I don’t do this anymore. Not because I think business books are bad — some of them are genuinely excellent — but because I’ve noticed that the books that actually changed how I think, how I build, how I make decisions, aren’t the ones with frameworks on the cover.
The Framework Trap
Business books have a structural problem. Most of them are a single insight stretched to 250 pages. The insight might be brilliant — “good strategy is about focus and trade-offs,” “great companies have a flywheel” — but by the time you’ve read the third case study illustrating the same point, you’re not learning anymore. You’re being convinced.
And conviction without nuance is a dangerous thing when you’re running a company. Frameworks are maps, and maps are useful, but the person who mistakes the map for the territory will walk straight into a wall they didn’t see coming.
I read Good to Great early on and it shaped how I thought about hiring. I read Positioning by Ries and Trout and it shaped how I thought about market strategy. These were valuable. But at a certain point, the marginal return on the next business book approached zero. Every new one was either rephrasing something I’d already absorbed or offering a framework so context-dependent that applying it to an eight-person B2B agency was an exercise in creative fiction.
What Replaced Them
The books that have shaped my thinking most in the last few years come from completely different shelves. History. Philosophy. Literary nonfiction. The occasional novel that cracked something open.
Reading Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson taught me more about power dynamics, persuasion, and stakeholder management than any book with “leadership” in the title. It wasn’t abstracted into a model. It was the thing itself — a person navigating real complexity in real time, with all the moral ambiguity that implies.
Reading John McPhee taught me about structure — how to take a complex subject and find the narrative architecture that makes it coherent without making it simple. This directly affects how I think about content strategy, about the way you sequence information to build understanding rather than just attention.
Reading Nassim Taleb — not the business-adjacent stuff, but the deeper philosophical arguments about uncertainty — changed how I think about planning. Not because he gave me a framework, but because he demolished my confidence in frameworks, which turned out to be exactly what I needed.
The Adjacent Possible
There’s a concept in evolutionary biology called the adjacent possible. It describes how innovation happens not through giant leaps, but through small steps into the space that’s immediately reachable from where you currently are. Each step opens new doors that weren’t visible before.
Reading outside your domain is the intellectual version of this. When you only read business books, you’re walking in circles inside the same room. The ideas are all drawn from the same case studies, the same companies, the same narrow slice of human experience. You get better at speaking the language of business, but you don’t get better at thinking.
When you read widely — when a book about urban planning makes you rethink your approach to information architecture, or a biography of a composer changes how you think about creative collaboration — you’re stepping into adjacent rooms. The connections you make are original because nobody else in your industry is making them. Your thinking develops texture.
Reading as Divergence
There’s a practical dimension to this too. The business books most founders read are the same business books. Which means that business-book thinking produces business-book strategies, which are by definition not differentiated. If everyone has read Crossing the Chasm, then the insights from Crossing the Chasm are table stakes, not advantages.
The founders and operators I admire most are voracious readers, but their reading is wildly divergent. One reads architectural theory. Another is deep into cognitive science. A third reads mostly poetry and literary criticism. What they share is the ability to import ideas from foreign domains and apply them with precision.
Bruno and I talk about this often. The strategic decisions at PipelineRoad that have worked best weren’t the ones that came from following a playbook. They were the ones that came from a different kind of pattern recognition — seeing something in a completely unrelated context and realizing it applied.
What I Still Read
I haven’t abandoned business books entirely. When I’m entering a new market or working with a client in an industry I don’t know well, I’ll read the canonical texts to build baseline literacy. I’ll still pick up a business book if someone I deeply respect tells me it changed how they operate.
But my reading ratio has shifted dramatically. For every business book, I’m reading five or six books from other domains. And the return on that investment — in clarity of thought, in originality of approach, in the ability to see patterns that others miss — has been asymmetric.
The irony is that reading fewer business books has made me better at business. Not because the knowledge doesn’t matter, but because the most valuable knowledge is the kind that arrives from an unexpected direction. The kind you can’t find by staying in the section of the bookstore where everyone else is browsing.