[...] One of the scourges of the business book genre is its overreliance on metaphor, and inevitable transformation of popular metaphors into industry jargon. If someone tells me, for example, that they're looking for a "gorilla" stock, I know they're referring to Geoffrey Moore's "The Gorilla Game." Normal people do not. It gets especially annoying when the metaphors are so ubiquitous that people mix them with reckless disregard for how ridiculous they sound. "I'm looking for a gorilla that will cross the chasm by living on the right side of the fault line." That sentence is completely incomprehensible if you haven't read Moore's books or don't have the aid of a trusty Moore-to-English dictionary. (Don't get me wrong; Moore's a smart guy, but most of his key ideas could probably be distilled into a 20 page white paper - without the metaphors.)

Of course, my general disdain for business books may have something to do with my general snobbery, which I've never taken any great pains to conceal. I put self-help books, along with business books, in that category of disgusting bourgeois affectations that I hope never to acquire despite being disgustingly bourgeois myself. [...]