Library of the living dead

How often do you hear a really successful business person say it was a book that taught them everything they knew"?

Exactly. Business books do not make you smarter, warns a brilliant piece in the April issue of Fast Company. In fact, they can actually reduce your intelligence, much in the same way that diet books generally reduce the size of your wallet, but not your waistline, and self help books seriously damage your will to live.

OK, that's a bit over the top. But on the whole, the business book genre relies on peddling cliches and "tortured metaphors...usually involving cute animals with simple, vaguely ambulatory problems - mice chasing moving cheese, penguins realising their iceberg is melting and having nowhere to go," the writer explains.

Look at the bestseller list and you'll probably find such classics as Donald Trump's Think Big and Kick Ass and Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life. But rather than propel us into action, these books encourage us to "amble zombielike through our careers, freeing us from responsibility for the quality of our own decision making" and make us feel like we're making progress simply because we've got more to think about.

So before you coerce your overstretched brain into learning the 7 habits, 12 disciplines or 50 ways to do everything and nothing, consider the fact that most problems "are usually too complex to be reduced to one-size-fits-all solutions" and force yourself to do your own analysis.

Who knows, there might even be a book in it somewhere.

*If you've got any favourite worst offenders - or gems that defy the rule - we'd love to hear about them.