A different form of literature

Our consultants encounter a type of writing that seems terribly strange, until they realize what it’s for.

In setting up Five Colors Science & Technology as a business, our consultants knew they were heading into unfamiliar territory.  Among them they had vast experience in science, technology old and new, different languages and cultures, deep-sea sailing, even a bit of international development; but nothing to speak of in operating or marketing a business.

So we set out to learn, in the most straightforward way (to us, at least): we bought some books and talked to people in the field.  And to we who had read literature from different centuries and countries, scientific papers and philosophy, novels and poems, business books turned out to be different from anything we’d seen before.

There was a painfully cavalier attitude toward numbers.  A certain return on investment is “one-half of one percent.  That’s 0.005 percent. . .”  Well, no.  One-half of one percent is one part in 200, while 0.005 percent is one part in 20,000.  That is a sizable difference.

And a painfully cavalier attitude toward facts.  “55% of communication comes from body language, 38 percent from voice and only a mere 7 percent from words.”  We know that isn’t true in all situations, and is dreadfully off in some.  The author has apparently picked up a stray fact from somewhere (he doesn’t say where), removed all context, and used it where convenient.

And a cavalier attitude toward logic.  Because there are so many people watching YouTube, “you cannot afford not to” be uploading videos.  Well, no.  There are over a billion Chinese, but learning Mandarin is not necessarily going to be worthwhile for an Alexandria-based concern.

Who is the author?  There is a great deal about his activities, but looking at the list of things as we would a resume, there’s almost nothing in solid accomplishments.  He has sold a lot of books, but very little evidence is presented that they’ve done any business any good.  There is rather a lot of stuff that’s simply irrelevant.

Finally our astronomer had an epiphany: these are business books; they are always selling.  Everything is an ad!  Their main purpose is not, as we had assumed, to impart information; it is to sell.

So the books must be read as you would any advertisement.  Facts, logic and figures exist only to support the ad campaign, and are not to be relied on seriously.  Any real information appears only by the way, and is more reliable the less the author pays attention to it.  It’s unfortunate, annoying, and makes reading them much harder.

The only consolation is that, since most of the material is fluff, there’s not a lot that we actually need to remember.