Plot Twist

Business-Book Hall of Fame

Some big sellers executives have turned to over the decades

For nearly a century, business books reigned supreme as the communication medium of choice between experts and their supplicants. Popular titles became national phenomena in the 1930s: blockbuster titles like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) have, according to some sources, sold over 110 million copies combined since their publications. In the years that followed, executives published their hard-won lessons at a steady clip, aiming to burnish their reputations and spike their speaking fees. The phenomenon perhaps reached peak popularity in the 1980s, just as globalization was baffling longtime managers. Books provided the appearance of answers: In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Robert H. Waterman Jr. and Tom Peters appeared in 1982, demystifying what, exactly, to do at work (their advice: walk around as a form of management and be biased toward action). It was shortly followed by Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) and Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (1989), the latter of which has sold over 40 million copies.

Even the dot-com boom couldn’t stop the book boom: The topics of bestselling business books merely shifted—from nuts-and-bolts to more abstract concepts. Titles like Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don’t by Jim Collins (2001) and Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (2005) sold over four million copies each while explaining the secrets of how the business world works. Buying business books and reading them from cover to cover was a cultural pastime throughout corporate America.

That silent reading dependably sparked fireworks. “It led to these big discussions,” says career-training-firm owner Jordana Megonigal, who read roughly 20 books with her colleagues during her previous tenure as an executive at a business-media company. In a break from the gratingly faux-polite conversations at many workplaces, her peers felt comfortable throwing down the gauntlet and debating an author’s opinion. “Even if people didn’t agree,” she says, “they knew where the concept was coming from.” Titles included Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne (2005), The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcom Gladwell (2000), Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin (2008), and Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable... About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business by Patrick Lencioni (2004), which the executive team read when shifting to five-minute touchpoints instead of meetings. “In exchange for reading a really short book, it reduced a lot of pushback,” she says. “No one felt like the CEO was pulling the rug out from under them.”

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Books have always been the ultimate tool for deep thinkers, and executives increasingly see them as a way to effectively get into workers’ heads. An engaging book can deeply shape personal thinking. “Readers hear it in their own voice and can integrate it in a way that gets to the core of who they are,” says Chi Hitchens, an executive consultant who assembles booklists for both leaders and organizations. “It’s not enough to do workshops and give examples.” This might be why smartphones and laptops have not sounded the expected death knell for training via books. Despite the publishing industry’s struggles—revenue growth did not keep up with inflation over the first two decades of this century—leaders in the know realize that books offer what trainings cannot: a common lexicon, a shared vision, and talking points.

This breath of (very old) fresh air comes to a corporate world that’s shifting to online and instructor-led training: Almost 80 percent of organizations now use virtual classrooms, webcasting, or video broadcasting for training, according to Research.com. In the US alone, firms poured $98 billion into training programs last year.

“In exchange for reading a really short book, it reduced a lot of pushback.”

But survey after survey has found that even the most creative online program rarely captures worker attention. In the Research.com study, more than 60 percent of workers said they felt only “somewhat satisfied” or “less satisfied” with their training opportunities. Remarkably, more and more employees are leaning on their own learning strategies to build up their AI skills. All of which opened the door for firms to turn old-school.

For her part, Hitchens ensures that books actually get read (or listened to) with a two-step process. First, she personally provides people with a copy. This overcomes a key barrier. Then she encourages them to schedule time with their book as they would a meeting. “People send me confirmation that they’ve actually scheduled reading sessions,” says Hitchens. “Ninety-seven percent of the time they do it, especially if I have buy-in that it’s going to help them be more effective leaders.”