The Business Book

Big Ideas Simply Explained

By: DK

Narrated by: James Cameron Stuart

Exploring and explaining more than 80 of the world's most important theories and big ideas about trade, commerce, and management, this audiobook offers a fascinating look at the world of business past and present.

A perfect primer on the fundamental tenets of the subject, The Business Book sheds light on some of history's most important milestone developments and the key business strategies used by leading thinkers and gurus from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs.

Each influential business idea is explained clearly and simply using easy-to-understand explanations, making the world of trade and commerce accessible to everyone from students and those working in business to would-be entrepreneurs. It also features inspirational business ideas and over 100 memorable quotations narrated by James Cameron Stuart.

© 2014 Dorling Kindersley Ltd © 2019 DK Audio

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.