His writing is amazing, his lectures even more so.
Here's an example lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRYcSuyLiJk
One example of massively overrated MBA-school schlock: "Getting More: How You Can Negotiate to Succeed in Work and Life" - Stuart Diamond (2012).
It takes effort to make valuable things, and it takes effort to find valuable things. I don't think we are collectively trending either way.
Stuart Diamond's book is stuffed with underwhelming anecdotes teaching people to be pushy and manipulative with people in low-wage, low-security service jobs [in the US], but moreover selling them that this is being a "master negotiator with elite MBA-school skillz", not just super-pushy, annoying, entitled, whiny. Like the 'cure' for empathy. The only thing I took from it was "Wow it must really suck to work a low-wage, low-security service job in the US these days". I used to think "emotional labor" was hyperbole, but this sort of schlock would change my mind. ("one of the world's leading experts on negotiation. His book, has sold more than 1 million copies, making it world's largest selling book on the subject since it was published in 2011."(!?))
This is much worse than merely the empty superficiality that Po Bronson warned about, which seems harmless by comparison.
I agree it's there. But there's always been people willing to push out bad books for money. And there's also people putting as much, if not more, effort on quality content. I really don't think content is getting worse on average. There's a lot of fluctuation in the noise levels.
But maybe the signal to noise ratio is getting worse. I don't systematically analyze this. Just honestly don't think it's harder to find good books now then 10 or 20 years ago. I did move from a country and language with a fraction of the publication volume you can find in English, and to a country with many high quality physical bookstore that I trust for curation and discoverability of material so I'm biased there.
Even old-school stuff like "How to Make Friends and Influence People" clearly implies that your behavior in interactions is not some consequence-free zone, the people/organizations on the receiving end of your influencing attempts have memories, and there are social limits on what behavior is too aggressive, greedy, pushy, unreasonable, manipulative.
As well as boosting this sort of manipulative garbage, the NYT also runs articles on customer-service nightmares and dead-end jobs (and (gasp) 'authenticity'), which seems to having your cake and eating it.
There's something zeitgeisty to the book and the reception it got, which is why I keep referencing the Po Bronson speech. Diamond's book an apologia for an entire generation being unreasonable and manipulative, which is noteworthy, just as previous books that captured a zeitgeist.
> Do you want to crusade against bad books?
I don't see that calling a bad book and author bad constitutes crusading; that seems like twisting a straightforward discussion. Instead of trying to impute motives, I think you're just saying "it seems to me futile to object to superficiality, just ignore it", is that right? (Conversely, do you want to crusade against HN posts which you deem to be non-actionable? Presumably you don't either.)
I did also nod towards a wider ongoing discussion about superficiality vs authenticity as pops up in Po Bronson, Chuck Palahniuk, HN [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=superficial], Susan Cain, Haemin Sunim... that took me a couple of sentences, still not a crusade.