Book smart

With people working so much these days, they often have little time to keep up with the most important business literature. Kevin Duncan’s new book provides a brief solution to this problem

KEVIN DUNCAN’S new book is the latest entry in the ever-growing literary black hole that is “ideas I wish I’d had”.

Business Greatest Hits: A Masterclass in Modern Business Ideastakes the biggest selling business books of the last 25 years or so and reduces them down to a few pages of bullet points, summarising the bits you need to know and ditching the filler.

This solves a basic problem of modern business life. Anyone keen to advance their career and look smart in to the bargain, should read the most important books on the shelves. But these people are working most of the time and are often too tired or too stressed to hit the books in their down time.

Duncan,who also wrote Marketing Greatest Hits: A Masterclass in Modern Marketing Ideas, says: "You have a bizarre situation where there is all sorts of interesting stuff being raised that is either not being read or that gets a very quick skim and is often misinterpreted, leaving these ideas to be left to people running around talking nonsense".

His day job is as a training consultant, which is where the idea for his own book took root. “I thought it would stand me in good stead to know what these writers were talking about”.

He keeps a small postcard inside every book he reads onto which he jots down any interesting points that come up. This was the basis of a training scheme he ran for clients called, “A Crash Course in Marketing Theory”. As his personal library grew, so too did the need to remember the best bits of each book.

Duncan's consulting work helps keep him in touch with the publishing zeitgeist. "People in meetings often quote new books so I take note to follow up on new ones. Typically I've got 10 books that I should buy at any one time and six that are on the shelf. Then you get fads and crazes. If you suddenly hear about Malcolm Gladwell's Blinkor Chris Anderson's Freeit's obviously imperative that I understand what it's about. I always seek out the famous ones, people like Clay Shirky or Seth Godin and then carefully see what else they have written".

There are very few surprises in Greatest Hitswhich are organised in loose groupings. These include "The Classics: Old Hat or Still Relevant?" ( Built to Last and Good to Greatby Jim Collins, In Search of Excellenceby Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, The Age of Unreasonby Charles Handy etc), "Screw it, Let's Do It: The Elusive Art of Leadership" and "Black Swans and Flat Worlds: The Big Themes", which jams together Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Gladwell's Outlierswith other big sellers such as Nudgeand Wikinomics.

Each comes with a couple of pages of summary followed by a one sentence catch all, which in terms of digested reads is pushing it. Take Nudgefor example.

The book, written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, caught the imagination of policy makers in the US and elsewhere due to its discussion of how we apply the new science of choice architecture to nudge people towards decisions that, the authors hope, will improve their lives by making them healthier, wealthier and freer.

Critics have decried the book for being little more than a postmodern take on social engineering. Duncan’s summary of this very complex book is: people will make irrational choices if left to their own devices.

It's important to note that there is not one word of criticism in Greatest Hits, which as the book's title suggests, have been selected because Duncan liked them, or thought them important. "I've no desire or interest to include books just to slag them off. That would have been completely counter-productive".

As a result he says, the response of most of the authors is an overwhelming thank you. "These writers are grateful for faithfully reproducing what they were going on about and appreciative of the publicity". The Greatest Hitsformat gets the titles out there in a different way, which Duncan believes is, generally constructive to everybody.

However, one of the questions underpinning the book is what makes an idea last? Given how many business books are published each year, why is it that Tom Peters is still taught in business schools or Jim Collins sells in six figures 10 years after Built to Lastwas first published?

"Broadly speaking a book published in 1980 could have some home truths that remain relevant today as they did then. The older the concept the more likely it is to be misquoted and abused in a business context, whether that's people talking about Who Moved My Cheese?or The Seven Habits of an Effective Manageror Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats, where even de Bono himself says he is dismayed at how people misuse his technique".

THERE IS a received wisdom in publishing, he says, “that most business books have said what they need to say on the dust jacket of the book, and that the rest is just filler. Without being derogatory, and if there is an element of truth in that, it should be possible to summarise these books succinctly. The authors of all these books would have had to do this anyway to get them published.

“It wasn’t my intention to suggest that any of these coveted books can be whittled down in this way, it’s more if you like the sound of them you can go and buy them if you feel like you need to know more”.

Duncan’s relative obscurity meant he wasn’t pestered by publishing public relations flacks trying to get their clients in to his book. But the most important question, given that he has read so many business books, is what was his favourite?

It's a question he is both expecting and dreading. But when pushed he plumps, perhaps surprisingly, for Adam Morgan's Eating The Big Fish, a book that began life as an investigation into challenger brands such as Avis.

He also likes Seth Godin’s short and snappy approach. “Godin is a character who writes short, and interestingly his short books sell better than his long books. He is also a very well known and prolific blogger and I like the way he just tells it straight in short paperback, gives you 40 ideas in a row and goes home. That’s my style”.

The desire for brevity is part of a bigger point Duncan's books make and explains his Greatest Hitsseries. "I'd really like it if the publishing industry encouraged shorter books. One of the anachronisms of the book publishing industry is that you receive a contract in advance of writing it, telling you how many words it should contain. What happens is that the publishers says he or she wants 50,000 words so it looks nice between two covers. But often the author is done and dusted within 25,000 but is encouraged to carry on".

There are no hard covers in digital publishing however, removing such constraints. The longer term effect of the iPad and its followers could be to grant Duncan’s wish sooner rather than later.