It is finally that time of year when many of us can switch on the out-of-office and head off for a well-deserved break. It’s also one of the few times of the year when we have time to read a book or five.
If you’re someone who trawls airport bookshops at the last minute, you may have noticed a trend in the non-fiction section. The business shelves are carefully calibrated with biographies of founders who overcame adversity and built a company, books about what you can learn from the world’s most successful rugby nation, and leadership lessons that will supposedly transform your career. There is also the inevitable social media influencer revealing the mentality you need as a leader. There might even be a few memoirs from people who have built a massive company and want to pass on the secrets of their journey to the top.
That final category has some value, but over the years my own reading habits have shifted towards corporate biographies and economic history. Too dull and heavy for your poolside reading in the afternoon? Well, what I find beneficial is the overall narrative of where these companies came from, how they grew, faced challenges, navigated cycles, transitioned from one management team to another, dealt with change and either thrived or failed.
These stories show rise and decline, success and hubris, strategy and failure
Founder flaws
But there is another reason I increasingly prefer corporate histories. Founder memoirs often suffer from a fundamental flaw. Their story is usually reconstructed after the outcome is known, which makes strategy appear more coherent and decisions more obvious than they were at the time. Corporate histories are a great deal messier. They contain wrong turns, failed acquisitions, boardroom battles and scandals. They are much closer to how companies are actually run.
What you can learn from writers such as William Cohan, through his histories of General Electric, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and other companies, is far more useful. These are exhaustive multigenerational stories. They show rise and decline, success and hubris, strategy and failure. They should remind any senior executive that permanence is never guaranteed and change is inevitable.
It gets you into the room with powerful people at moments of extraordinary pressure
The behemoths laid bare
Brad Stone’s two-volume account of Amazon, The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound, provides a similarly useful perspective. It is a warts and all history of the world’s biggest retailer. At times it is not flattering about the online giant, but what it shows is the relentless focus that built the company, which entered new markets and scaled at extraordinary speed.
Another book I’d add to the suitcase is Barbarians at the Gate, the account of the RJR Nabisco takeover by private equity firm KKR. It is not so much a tale of a takeover war as a story about leverage, incentives and the role they play in corporate decision-making.
More recently, Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine, on the rise of Nvidia, is a history of how a company built an extraordinary competitive advantage through long-term investment, engineering culture and relentless execution over decades to finally meet its moment.
Not every corporate history has a happy ending, and that is precisely the point
If you happen to be someone who regularly engages with management consultants, Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe’s When McKinsey Comes to Town is worth reading. These are the firms many businesses pay significant sums to for advice, so you may as well understand how they think, operate and exercise influence inside organisations.
For economic history I still turn to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s meticulous account of the 2008 financial crisis in Too Big to Fail. It gets you into the room with powerful people at moments of extraordinary pressure and shows the decisions they made. What makes it valuable is that it strips away the myth of calm leadership. The people in the room often had incomplete information, conflicting incentives and very little time.
The winners’ spin
None of this is to say you should avoid the memoirs of successful entrepreneurs. They can be entertaining and occasionally insightful. They are usually stories told by the winners, with the benefit of hindsight and the temptation to impose a neat narrative on a messy reality.
The books that have taught me the most are the ones that treat companies as institutions rather than their founders as heroes. They remind you that every successful business is built by more than one person and eventually faces competition, complacency, succession and disruption. Not every corporate history has a happy ending, and that is precisely the point. Understanding how a company survives for decades, adapts to change or ultimately fails is a far better business lesson than reading how one person conquered the world.
