To be fair to the readers of popular management books, I think many of them really aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid but are sort of foraging for ideas they may find useful. They may get value from a book if it inspires them, stimulates a new idea or even reminds them of an old one. The overall rigor of the book’s message is thus often of secondary importance.

This attitude frustrates us academics, because we are intensely interested in valid intellectual frameworks and have little use for helpful metaphors, bits of persuasive rhetoric, clever rules of thumb, etc., especially if their domain of usefulness can’t be pinned down accurately. But the readers of these books have different priorities.