I recently finished reading Andy Grove’s High Output Management (hereafter ‘HOM’). This post contains my brief thoughts, not so much on the content per se, but rather about the genre/intellectual category of the book more generally. Growing up, I was pretty convinced that the genre of business books (much like self-help books or how-to-get-rich books) was simply a collection of platitudes and really not worth reading. A typical example of such a book is: a conventionally successful person writes a book on why/how he (almost invariably a ‘he’) succeeded. Most obviously, there is the issue of survivorship bias and hindsight bias. Even if we ignore the role of luck and the narrative fallacy, there is a question of incentive: why would the person reveal the secrets of his success and sell them to the lay reader at $30 per book?[1] I tend to think such books are vanity projects, i.e. the author coasts on the
High Output Management and the Water Supply
High Output Management and the Water Supply
High Output Management and the Water Supply
I recently finished reading Andy Grove’s High Output Management (hereafter ‘HOM’). This post contains my brief thoughts, not so much on the content per se, but rather about the genre/intellectual category of the book more generally. Growing up, I was pretty convinced that the genre of business books (much like self-help books or how-to-get-rich books) was simply a collection of platitudes and really not worth reading. A typical example of such a book is: a conventionally successful person writes a book on why/how he (almost invariably a ‘he’) succeeded. Most obviously, there is the issue of survivorship bias and hindsight bias. Even if we ignore the role of luck and the narrative fallacy, there is a question of incentive: why would the person reveal the secrets of his success and sell them to the lay reader at $30 per book?[1] I tend to think such books are vanity projects, i.e. the author coasts on the