Leadership’s Future: Business Book Cheat Sheets
by Miki Saxon
I saw an ad in Business Week for getAbstract, which seems to be Cliff Notes for business.
Each five-page summary is presented in a crisp magazine-page format. You can read it in less than 10 minutes – the perfect length to deliver the book’s key ideas. The no-fluff summaries are logically structured to get the maximum out of your reading time.
I agree that there’s too much fluff in many business books, but that fluff serves a purpose.
It’s often the fluff that helps people learn, because the differences are in the fluff and it’s the differences to which they relate. In other words, while someone may be deaf to one presentation another might resonate deeply leading to substantial change.
Think about it; how many times have the lessons you took away from a certain book been so different from a colleague as to make you wonder if you both read the same book.
So how valuable are the summaries? Probably about as valuable as online cheat sheets if that’s all that is read.
Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.
Granted, I haven’t read any of the abstracts, but my experience says that you will lose much of a books’ real value—especially the subtle ideas that play directly to your own MAP—by relying on just a five page summary.
But perhaps this is the future; a world where all ideas and learning come predigested, so they can be sucked up through a straw and thoroughly homogenize the workforce.
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/197325980/
