Business Fables: The End

More than 11,000 business books are published in the United States each year. Whether it’s a self-help manual or a strategy tome, a memoir or an exposé, some new release is certain to suit your particular taste and needs. But one genre has fallen out of fashion in recent years: the business fable, or management fiction.

On the surface, this idea is intriguing: Use made-up stories to fully convey the emotional and psychological factors that complicate our work lives, while also imparting practical lessons about how to achieve greater success. A classic example is Who Moved My Cheese? (1998), by Spencer Johnson, a simple story about a cat and a mouse that aims to help readers deal with change. The book was a best seller in the early 2000s and may have sold as many as 26 million copies worldwide. (Sources vary.) But that was the genre’s apogee, and it’s been downhill ever since. Why?

If you consider the evolutionary purpose of stories, as Jonathan Gottschall does in The Storytelling Animal (2012), the appeal of this kind of writing becomes clear. We read stories to discover how characters act when they encounter trouble—a marriage on the rocks, a tsunami, Cruella de Vil. We keep reading to see how they find their way out of it. And we learn something in the process. Work is full of trouble, and trouble is what fiction does best. (HBR employs this strategy in its Case Studies, though we base them on dilemmas facing real people in real companies.)

But engaging readers on an emotional level is easier said than done. As I read a fable and two novels for this article (the only new ones I could find), I realized that it’s particularly difficult in management fiction. Although all the authors definitely had trouble on the brain, none of them hooked me. In Trust Works! an employee feels that his boss doesn’t trust him; in Creativeship a recent retiree is uneasy about his free time; and in The Leader’s Climb a CEO is stuck in a rut. I found all three situations interesting, and I could relate to them. But the authors break the cardinal rule of fiction: Show, don’t tell. Their lessons overwhelm their narratives. As a result, their stories are mediocre, and their teachings are often banal.

The lessons of these authors overwhelm their narratives. As a result, their stories are mediocre, and their teachings are often banal.

Take Trust Works!, written by Ken Blanchard (a coauthor, with Spencer Johnson, of the übersuccessful The One Minute Manager), Cynthia Olmstead, and Martha Lawrence. The book is a hybrid of sorts: The first half is a fable containing two intertwined stories, and the second is a self-help section that extrapolates lessons from those tales. It’s a common formula, not much different from how nonfiction writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis begin a chapter with a story in order to engage us and illustrate a concept before they explain it. But the Blanchard team’s task is much tougher. Because the fable is the lifeblood of their book, everything that follows hinges on its quality, and the authors don’t pull it off.

The first story is about a dog named Woof who’s trying to befriend a cat, and the second is about a man named Berryhill who’s trying to win the confidence of his boss. Eventually they both succeed (in case you doubted), and we as readers are supposed to learn about the ins and outs of trust building in the process. But instead of letting us do that on our own, the authors use characters—a Yoda-inspired parrot is one—who flat out tell us how to think: “If you want to be Believable, the most important thing is to stay honest. That means no exaggerating—or minimizing—the truth.” In case that’s not clear enough, they insert text boxes—“Building trust takes time,” “Trust is a two-way street”—before we even get to the book’s second section.

The two novels, Creativeship and The Leader’s Climb, are much better than Trust Works!, but the end result is similar: Because the authors are less concerned with stories than with lessons, the trouble isn’t troublesome enough.

Creativeship, from Bob Kelleher (with Liz Batchelder), the founder and CEO of the Employee Engagement Group, follows Joe Daniels, a recent retiree, as he spends his free time trying to come up with a new definition of leadership based on his experiences as a management consultant. Although Kelleher doesn’t cut into Joe’s story with lesson breaks or litter the chapters with sidebars and questionnaires, he fails to create a well-rounded character. We learn of Joe’s work experiences in flashbacks only—how he had to fire one of his team’s top performers, for example—so the book lacks punch. Joe knows too much, so it’s hard to identify with his struggles. Even worse, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that he’s really just a vehicle for the author’s ideas about leadership. By the time I reached the end, I was disengaged from Joe and unimpressed by Kelleher’s message about the crucial role that innovation and creativity play in a company’s growth. That’s old news.

The Leader’s Climb is the best of the bunch, but it suffers from all the same flaws. Its main character, Adam, is a CEO who has hit a plateau, but instead of immersing us in his story, the authors—Bob Parsanko and Paul Heagen—use a handyman and a park ranger to pontificate about the virtues of slowing down, making better decisions, and refusing to sweat the small stuff. Again, the description, dialogue, and dramatic arc are there only to dress up the advice.

Good fiction doesn’t just entertain, it teaches—but in a very subtle way. We could use more stories about trouble at work, but these books aren’t up to snuff. My advice? If you’re looking for practical lessons or general knowledge, stick to nonfiction. And if you’re looking for a great narrative that gets you thinking, read David Foster Wallace, Aesop, or even Kafka. Just don’t read a business fable.