[mercwear]

If you are attempting to follow the advice of business books verbatim that could be the problem.

Most / all of the good ones I have read tell one view of what led to success. I take what I learn and attempt to apply it to my own schools of thought and with any luck come out of the exercise with a more well rounded opinion than I went in with.

Your post seems to advocate for peer reviews in business books as well, don’t you think that unbiased reviews from readers fill that need?

[tensor]

Reader reviews are absolutely unable to determine most of the things the author points out. I generally don't read business books because my "school of thought" is that "science works for gaining understanding, nothing else does."

The author of this joke piece is pretty spot on in terms of the non-scientific mistakes these books almost always make. E.g. correlation != causation, anecdotes != data and so on.

[lallysingh]

I think there's pipeline of Harvard Business Review (and similar) articles to the book shelf, and it has to stop. The article has the meat, and then it's repeated/filled/fluffed into a book.

There are services that trim them back.

[dubeyaayush07]

It was just an off-hand joke and readers are not peers in the sense they are the people who are not familiar with the content of the book.