The Legend Begins: How Business Biographies Can Offer Bad Advice

We’re all looking for help in getting better at our jobs.  It’s only natural to turn to books written by people who have “made it” — the heroes of the business world.

As a reader, it’s easy to fall into one of two traps: Discounting the story completely, or buying totally into it the way it’s told. Some of these stories are good, some are even great, but many are worth less than we hope and expect in terms of providing real guidance for us in our daily work life.

You can get something good out of just about any business book. They almost always provide some great anecdotes and business stories from which you can make your own meaning.

But it’s important to be be wary of accepting at face value the author’s analysis or conclusions about why something turned out the way it did, and especially the author’s own evaluation of what he or she did to make it successful!

Why? Successful people are usually very, very good at some things. It’s just that in their own recollection of what they’ve done, they are often mistaken about what those good things that really mattered actually were! They tend to overestimate some skill or competency they think they had or should have had, and completely overlook another which they actually had in great abundance, and which played heavily in their success.

Your job in reading their books is to decode what they’re saying and read between the lines to extract the real lessons hiding in there.

One common example is the big-business CEO’s book. He or she often writes as though the path to success was carefully and meticulously planned, and they tell you how they — always demonstrating excellent benevolent-leader behavior — inspired the masses, marshaled resources and marched forward in a linear and orderly way, step-by-step, to achieve their goals, with no hint of anything haphazard or random.

Actually, it’s usually more likely that they were really good meanderers through the wild and unpredictable world of the business they were in, and were masterful at getting things done despite the peculiar bureaucracies they worked for. Oh, they had a plan. Make no mistake about that. They had to in order to get their Boards to trust them, But after the starter’s pistol went off, they were quick to see opportunities as they arose, and were willing to be flexible enough to take detours from the master plan to take bold action inside a reality that was literally changing before their eyes.

They’re not really lying to you when they cast themselves as the hero-planners in these stories of their successful careers. I truly believe that when they look in the rearview mirror, their memory of the past looks to them more orderly than it actually was. Plus, I think most people continue to harbor a belief from early childhood that the Orderly Way is the right way to do things, and they feel that if they were successful, they must have been doing things the right way.

Finally, and maybe most important, people who were successful in big companies — whatever else they were good at — have been very, very good at convincing their Boards or their bosses, or whoever was responsible for their pay, that any success the company has enjoyed has been a direct result of their seeing to it that things got done just the way they predicted it would at that Board meeting at the beginning of the period.

Next: The Legend Continues: Why The Bad Advice Persists Unchallenged