Business Literature Quotes

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.

I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit.

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India.

While a lot of management development books try to teach you a lesson or give you a scenario of what corporate culture and work practices are about, they're theoretical and written in a sermonizing way. Most people don't get past the first chapter, and they just look nice on the bookshelf.

I had read everything Peter Drucker ever wrote.

I dislike reading business books, although I skim a lot of them.

'In Search of Excellence' was an afterthought, the runt of the McKinsey consulting litter, a hip-pocket project that was never supposed to amount to much.

I think 'Shoe Dog' by Phil Knight is the best memoir I've ever read by a business person.

I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through.

All you have to do is read the business literature. In the 1930s they were very frightened and they were concerned about how the rising power of the masses was hazardous to industrialists.