"Beam Me Up" is Better Than Business Books
April 06, 2009
TechCrunch's Mike Arrington penned a post yesterday titled "Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination. " The piece caught alot of people's attention with over 150 retweets on Twitter. As the lead states, Arrington proposes that entrepreneurs should skip all of these silly business books which are filled with "a whole lot of additional junk," and read science-fiction.
TechCrunch's Mike Arrington penned a post yesterday titled "Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination." The piece caught alot of people's attention with over 150 retweets on Twitter. As the lead states, Arrington proposes that entrepreneurs should skip all of these silly business books which are filled with "a whole lot of additional junk," and read science-fiction.
I think there are great lessons to learn in reading fiction. Questions of Character by Joe Badaracco shows how literature can be a wonderful source for studying leadership. Minding The Store edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge takes the similar route (a longer review is coming soon).
We'd prefer keeping the baby and the bathwater, but here are the books that Arrington recommended (essentially a "best of" sci-fi list):
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Foundation Trilogy by Issac Asimov
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Anathem by Neal Stephenson
- The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Rob May, of LifeStream Backup and formerly Businesspundit, chimed in on Twitter with a worthy thought to close this post: "The problem with Techcrunch's "forget biz books" post is that most founders already have too much imagination, what they need is biz sense."
