I'm convinced that all useful books are actually two books.
The first book contains the actionable tactics. These are easy to pick up: you just read.
The second book contains the principles that make the tactics work. This requires work to unearth.
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Examples: Never Split The Difference, by Chris Voss.
Book 1: A bag of negotiation techniques you may use in lots of situations. Primarily in English.
Book 2: The underlying principles behind those techniques. Important if you want to apply his techniques in another language.
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Example 2: Shape Up by .
Book 1: Methods for making software, that sit somewhere between agile sprints and the hardcore waterfall approach.
Book 2: A set of principles they've discovered by accident, that when applied to Basecamp look like the techniques in Book 1.
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Some authors write about pure principles first, but those are harder to apply. Hence my qualifier 'useful books'.
Perhaps I should have used 'actionable books' instead.
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Anyway, you'll often find people reading actionable/useful books and then applying the techniques from the book wholesale, without critical thinking about why they work.
In some cases, this is ok. Voss's techniques, for instance, generally work even if you just skim and apply.
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But in other cases this is a recipe for disaster. Applying Shape Up to your org without critical analysis for why the techniques work would likely backfire. (Basecamp is B2B SaaS, hugely profitable, has a brand and a large audience + stable recurring revenue).
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Another example: let's say you want to adopt agile. You pick up a book on agile, and one of the practices that the book prescribes is conducting morning scrum meetings.
"WE HAVE TO HAVE SCRUM MEETINGS" you say.
Problem: you are a fully distributed team across many timezones.
Replying to
Really stupid reaction: "Well, I guess agile can't work for remote."
Slightly stupid reaction: "We MUST have morning scrum meetings, so Joe has to wake up at 6am."
Better reaction: "What purpose do morning scrum meetings serve and can we evolve something equivalent?
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This is a really stupid example, but I've *actually* seen it.
Also for marketing practices (let's apply funnel analysis TO EVERYTHING). And software dev practices. And writing techniques.
I really don't know why it happens.
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