It’s a well-quoted but uncheckable statistic that the average CEO reads a book a week. Bill Gates claims to read around 50 books a year and says that ‘reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding’, while Warren Buffett’s advice is to read 500 pages a day: ‘That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.’
In the business world, the chances are that most of these books will be self-help themed. Stand in front of the business section at any large bookshop and you will be confronted with a dizzying array of titles on management, leadership, personal development, business biographies and autobiographies, and, most click-baity of all, ‘how-to-succeed’ books.
More than 80 million business and economics books are sold annually worldwide
It’s thought that more than 80 million business and economics books are sold annually worldwide, representing about a quarter of all adult non-fiction print sales. (It’s important to add a proviso here; not all books categorised as ‘business’ books are strictly that – the inclusion of more general self-help books bolsters the numbers considerably.) Exact numbers are guesswork as publishing statistics are notoriously opaque, and in the days of self-publishing they are becoming steadily more difficult to pin down.
There is no doubt that there is money in business books, particularly those that claim (or are perceived) to hold the secret to a stellar career. But what exactly does it take for a business book to become a bestseller?
Legendary status
The truth is that few really stand the test of time. Over the past 100 years, a handful of business books have reach legendary status, in some cases still selling decades after they were first published in numbers that would make most authors salivate.
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, for example – first published in 1936 – still sells around 250,000 copies worldwide every year and in 2013 was ranked the seventh most influential book in US history by the Library of Congress.
For comparison, the best-selling fiction book of all time is Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, with some estimates putting total sales at as much as 500 million. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, estimated in 2014 to have sold more than 200 million copies since it was first published in 1859, ranks a distant second.
The impact of some business books has been profound. Leading Change (1996), by John Kotter, is seen as the seminal text on organisational change, while The One Minute Manager – a book of fewer than 100 pages, published in 1982 – has been translated into 47 languages. Stephen R Covey, author of 1989’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, was invited to Camp David in 1994 by US president Bill Clinton – who wanted help integrating the book’s ideas into his presidency. And Taiichi Ohno, architect of the Toyota Production System and author of the 2001 book of the same name, is seen as the icon of the lean manufacturing movement.
Vocabulary creators
Other books have forever left their mark on business vocabulary. Lean In (2013) by Sheryl Sandberg has become shorthand for anything connected with women at work, while Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ (1995) by Daniel Goleman catapulted a previously fringe term into everyday language.
Meanwhile, The Black Swan (2007) by Nassim Taleb spent 36 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sparked endless debate over whether Covid-19 was a black swan event. (Spoiler: Taleb says that it was not, because pandemics are not unprecedented.)
Missing the mark
Inevitably, some bestselling business books have not stood the test of time.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t (2001) by Jim Collins was based on extensive research into almost 1,500 companies, designed to work out what separates outperforming businesses from the rest. Unfortunately, some – including Motorola and Wells Fargo – failed to stand the test of time (some of the reasons for which were analysed by Collins in the well-received 2009 followup, How the Mighty Fall).
Whatever happens in the business world, people will write about it
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s leadership book In Search of Excellence, which sold three million copies in the first four years after publication in 1982, has also attracted criticism, with some commentators arguing that it is not possible to identify the traits that make a company perform well simply by studying those that are already successful.
The book that has attracted the most vitriol, though, is Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? (1998), a ‘motivational business fable’ that tells the story of two mice and two ‘little people’ who encounter change during their hunt for cheese. The book has sold 30 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 37 languages.
After a number of incidences of the book being given to employees facing redundancy at a time of reorganisation, the political activist and author Barbara Ehrenreich called the book ‘a classic of downsizing propaganda’. It has also inspired parodies, including Who Cut the Cheese? by Stilton Jarlsberg and Who Moved My Soap?: The CEO’s Guide to Surviving Prison, by Andy Borowitz.
Constantly evolving
The Financial Times, which awards an annual Business Book of the Year, makes the point that the style and content of business books is constantly evolving. Whatever happens in the business world, people will write about it and business books will sell.
‘From globalisation to de-globalisation, from the first digital revolution to the AI age,’ said FT editor Roula Khalaf at the 2024 awards ceremony, ‘our understanding of capitalism and markets has evolved too, and our attention to the political economy has intensified – but the book award marches on.’
