How to Read a Business Book
More than 1,000 new business books are released each month in the United States alone. The good ones represent original contributions to theory and practice or provide meaningful extensions or applications of those theories and practices. The others tend to present recycled and superficial treatments of those original contributions. So how can you ensure not only that you’re reading a book that’s worth your time, but that you’re getting the most out of that time? The author presents eight ways to allocate your reading time to your greatest advantage through careful selection based on need, triaging the mode of consumption, and harvesting the takeaways for application.
Reading a business book is an exercise in efficiency, not literary aesthetics. You’re trying to maximize the return on time invested. For the executive, time allocation is as important as capital allocation. So, in approaching any business book, there are two goals: First, determining if the book can help you do your job; second, figuring out the quickest way to extract that value. In writing several business books — and reading more than I can count — I’ve found that, for books worth reading, the process consists of three steps: compression, absorption, and application.
By Timothy R. Clark via Harvard Business Review