The Business Book

Big Ideas Simply Explained

By: DK

Narrated by: James Cameron Stuart

You can achieve your business dream. Beat the odds as you learn from the best - including Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates - and turn your idea into an amazing and profitable enterprise.

The Business Book helps you overcome the hurdles facing every new business, such as finding a gap in the market, securing finance, employing people, and creating an eye-catching brand. It is a plain-speaking guide to 80 of the most important commerce theories including chaos theory, critical path analysis, market mapping, and the MABA matrix.

It demystifies complicated concepts and explains the ideas of seminal business thinkers, such as Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point" or Michael Porter's "five forces". It shows that you can succeed with stories of rags-to-riches entrepreneurs, including the founders of Hewlett-Packard, who began their global enterprise from their garage.

Whether you are a student, a CEO, or a would-be entrepreneur, The Business Book will inspire you and put you on the inside track to making your goal a reality.

Critic reviews

"Business is fascinating, made even more so by the 360-degree view offered [in The Business Book] on leadership, history, marketing, manufacturing, and all the other disciplines that comprise modern-day corporations." – Booklist

"[The Business Book] is definitely a title worth having in the collection." – Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA) Magazine

"More than a well-designed cheat sheet, The Business Book is a title that a young entrepreneur can dive into for valuable factoids to impress a potential investor, keeping the conversation going at a networking event or to simply fill in some knowledge gaps." – Success.com

Not a fan of the narration

I found the narration of this title distracting; pompous and full of exaggerated up and down inflection and weird halting pauses. That paired with the structure of the content - short blurbs about various points, almost like bullet points - made the whole thing turn into a droning list of random ideas that didn't really hold together. Might be better as a book you can dip into, read a short blurb, and then put down but not great to listen to. It just drones on and on and I find myself tuning it out.

Cherry Picking Success Stories (aka “No Duh”)

The themes of this book are important at a superficial level. But beyond that it just feels like examples are cherry picking the obvious success stories we all already know about (Ex: Ford, Sony, Coke, Apple, etc.). Ex: The book implies being first to market is nearly always an advantage, ignoring the many examples out there that did it succeed with this strategy.

To me it would be a lot more useful to contrast this with the unsuccessful stories thereby pointing out at a more granular level what most companies do wrong vs right. It doesn’t do this nearly often enough.