In keeping with my note a few days ago regarding PC World’s 10 Business Lessons Learned from Battlestar Galactica, I came across this post by Michael Arrington on the TechCrunch blog today: “Grok This: Forget The Business Books, Go Sci-Fi To Stoke Your Imagination.” Arrington says of business books that most “are a chapter of advice with a whole lot of additional junk thrown in to make it book thickness.” He urges the reader to skip business books, “since so many of them have conflicting advice on how to grow your company, or how to be a better manager, or how to get more done by working less.”
“If you really want to stoke your imagination,” he says, “spend all those hours reading science fiction instead. Every good entrepreneur needs a certain amount of imagination to envision the future.”
While I’m not prepared to totally agree with this dim regard for the entire business lit genre, I would agree with Arrington wholeheartedly that the creative thinking and intellectual stimulation produced in the reader by great science fiction is of inestimable value to any business strategist — or frankly, anyone alive and dealing with the world today in any capacity, from grammar school student to CEO. Arrington recommends some of my favorites, including Neal Stephenson, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams. He doesn’t have William Gibson on the list, so I’m adding him here! Tech savvy Web marketing type folks will get a kick out of his Pattern Recognition…
Tags: business, literature, science fiction
