Books for judging business advice before using it

A successful owner tells you to raise prices, hire a manager or expand into another town. The advice may be excellent. You still need to understand the business it came from and the problem you want it to solve.

These books offer three reading purposes: examine how an owner uses other people's ideas, notice your own attraction to an answer, or improve the conversation before advice becomes a plan. Infinite Upside is our first recommendation for its attention to circumstances.

1. Infinite Upside: learning from someone without borrowing their whole answer

   By Vijay Sheth.

   In Chapter 13 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live, Sheth describes taking different influences from Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. One expands what he can imagine building; the other prompts questions about understanding, price and business economics. Which influence helps depends on the opportunity.

   The chapter also draws a boundary around transferable experience. Knowing customers and service operations does not automatically confer knowledge of construction or infrastructure. That makes the memoir a useful first choice when you admire an accomplished person but want to remain responsible for your own decision.

   Read with a particular recommendation in mind. What did this person understand about their operation that you have yet to establish about yours? Sheth's discussion of useful disagreement gives the question another side: an objection deserves examination too. Confidence and pessimism both need a basis you can understand.

2. The Scout Mindset: examining why an answer appeals to you

   By Julia Galef.

   According to Portfolio's description, The Scout Mindset concerns the difference between defending a preferred belief and trying to understand what is true. Its emphasis is on habits and emotional skills involved in seeing more clearly.

   Imagine an invented owner who wants a second location. A consultant recommends expansion, and the owner immediately finds the consultant more convincing than the manager raising questions about staffing. The useful reading question is personal: am I judging the recommendation, or enjoying permission to do something I already want?

   Investigate Galef if that is the difficulty you recognize. Look in an available passage for a way to question your own confidence without becoming unable to choose. This is reading about your approach to evidence; it does not establish whether a particular consultant has relevant experience.

3. The Advice Trap: making room to understand the problem

   By Michael Bungay Stanier.

   The author's description emphasizes resisting premature advice, staying curious and asking questions that clarify the real challenge. The book principally addresses how leaders give advice. Its fit here is the quality of the conversation, rather than a method for rating advisers.

   Return to the invented owner. An expansion recommendation might arrive before anyone asks whether the present location lacks customers, capacity or a dependable manager. Those starting problems would give the same recommendation different meanings.

   You may need a conversation that gets clearer before it becomes conclusive. Consider this book if you also catch yourself supplying answers too quickly when a colleague asks for help. Your sample question could be: does this treatment help me stay with what the other person is trying to resolve before I propose a solution?

Choose the question you need next

A useful book should help you explain why a recommendation fits your situation. Choose the memoir for learning across circumstances, Galef for your own attachment to a conclusion, or Bungay Stanier for a more curious conversation.

If your concern is what a collection of winners leaves unknown, read the separate selected-success-stories explanation. For reviewing a decision after its outcome, use the decision-review exercise.

For an owner's account of learning from others while keeping the consequences his own, read Infinite Upside. Try the opening passage to see whether its voice suits the way you want to learn.