Comments

Yes! Books - even business books - should be engaging and interesting. Nobody wants boring stuff, and yet all too often we treat being dull and gray as if it's a Best Practice.

And as a reader, I've try to apply these two principles:

1) If it's interesting, it's relevant.
2) If I can put the book down, I do.

Posted by Dan Ward at May 31, 2006 4:30 AM

1. Words and language govern how we think
2. ... and how we feel
3. ... easy as tuning into women's view of import of lit and enterprise creation

Posted by Sean at May 31, 2006 4:55 AM

I used to think very differently about literary writing and technology/business writing. I expected literary writing to be a very slow process. Then I began writing technology articles, and I found that it took me a long time to write them, because of "too many" revisions and rephrasings to clarify points.

Now I've just completed a technology book ("MySpace Safety: 51 Tips") -- and have realized that in the end I wished I'd had more time to perfect that as well.

All writing is communication. All good writing conveys knowledge that has potential to help other people in some way. Excellent writing conveys knowledge and (possibly) wisdom. The topics and the time span may be different, but writing for today (for example, current technology writing) can affect lives just as deeply as writing for all time (literature).

The audience for literature is a select group of people spread across centuries. The audience for excellent business or technology writing is limited in time, but the total number of people whose lives may be positively affected, and the total "impact" on human society, can be just as great.

Posted by Kevin Farnham at May 31, 2006 11:12 AM

People put a lot of store on getting things done - and there is nothing wrong with that. What annoys me is that in the corporate world equal weight is not put on great ideas.

Events, products and stuff that gets done is temporary - great ideas last for 1000s of years

Posted by PaulH at June 1, 2006 1:19 AM

What a fabulous - and far too infrequently made - point.

I'm not sure the business books that don't read like great literary novels or inaugural addresses though aren't like that because the care hasn't gone into crafting them, but more because the writers of them cannot write. Business books take one of three forms in my experience:

1) The beautifully crafted (the type you're suggesting)

2) The "motion sickness" type ... punctuation, syntax and syllable usage are awry and vocabulary is limited. There's usually no defineable rythm to the language and pauses between the language and you get a kind of "motion sickness" reading it, like you do in a shift-stick car with an inexpereinced driver who doesn't know when to change the gears. You usually bought these because some major CEO or whatever wrote them and you wanted to hear what he/she had to say.

3) The "bland type" ... what is being said is fascinating in essence ... if only you could get through page 1! These are sometimes more difficult to define because the writer is usually an academic/consultant and at least has some writing experience, but a strong signal is when the text has no "voice" of its own - it feels kind of like reading a "list" does. You usually bought this type of book because it was marketed so well and the marketing was based around the core ideas (which are VERY deeply embedded) which seemed exciting, and indeed, do have the potential to be.

The fact is most people - even (or maybe especially!) academics and CEO's do not necessarily have a "feeling" for language, and to write a great book, you have to have that - no matter how smart you are (just try reading the Mc Kinsey Quaterly from cover-to-cover is what I always tell people when they doubt this). Incidentally, I'm convinced that's one of the reasons why "In Search of Excellence" was such a hit: it had great ideas, yes, but it was also written by authors who cared about the language - and as such, it had a real voice (that's also one of the reasons it's rejected by business schools).

Posted by Daniel M. Harrison at June 1, 2006 7:43 AM

for the epitomy of clear, concise, impactful economics and business writing - the economist!

Posted by onehandclapping at June 5, 2006 8:16 AM

onehandclapping: actually I disagree, and am embarrassed to do so. I think the Economist is brilliantly written, but usually I read it on a plane or on the toilet--and sometimes it is just too dense. Likewise I think the Special Reports are amazing--can't believe we get such research for newstand price; but again too many of them, pulled out, never get read--I am intimidated by them and often give up after the first page.

One helluvan admission!

Posted by tom peters at June 7, 2006 10:34 AM

Tom,

That's real honesty!

Posted by Daniel M. Harrison at June 8, 2006 3:04 PM