A business novel is a type of teaching story. Of course, teaching stories have been a part of world literature for thousands of years, and quite possibly pre-date the written word. They are often incorporated within religious texts; the Gita of the Hindu faith is an excellent example. The Judeo-Christian Bible has a number of them: the story of the Good Samaratan, and the Prodigal Son, just to name two. Mythologies are collections of stories intended to explain the universe and the forces and actors at work within it. The Dialogues of Plato are fiction. So, the business novel - the business story — is a tiny little branch of that tradition.
Now, let me bring this up early: whether the story “really happened” or not is irrelevant. What matters is whether the writing reveals a meaningful piece of truth for its audience. With the exception of biographies and some tightly focused histories, most non-fiction didn’t “really happen” any more than fiction. Non-fiction is a distillation of a broad range of experiences - data - that is reduced to an abstract idea; the range of experiences is what “happened” and not the abstraction set forth by its author. Good fiction and good non-fiction both stem from the same origins, and both can reveal truth, but they do so in different ways.
What defines a business novel, I think, are three essential elements. One is that the story seeks to reveal some concept or principle that is meaningful in the business world. Two, it has a didactic purpose; it is written with the motive of instructing the reader, and is not just for the reader’s entertainment. And, three, it must be a work of fiction, describing people and events who do not actually exist and never have. These may seem obvious, but I mention them so you get what I am not talking about:
Business is sometimes the backdrop for popular fiction (Rising Sun by Michael Crichton) and serious literature (Death of Salesman by Arthur Miller), but neither of those examples is a business novel. One is a pretty good suspense novel, the other a drama on the human condition, and both involve the business world, but they are not didactic, not in a business sense. You won’t learn, say, practical insights on managing a work team or how to make more money by reading them. (Hardly makes them worthless, though, does it?)
I am also not referring to works of non-fiction about business that almost read like novels. Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine and books by Michael Lewis The New New Thing and Liar’s Poker are excellent pieces of writing, and these do give important insights on business culture. But they are not fiction, and I would not say they have any particular didactic mission. Therefore, these types of books, worthy as they are, fall outside the scope of what I’m describing. (I will however touch upon these again in a later installment of the series.)
So, what I am calling a business novel consists of books like The One-Minute Manager, I Know It When I See It, and Who Moved My Cheese? - along with my own work. And there are a number of other perhaps lesser known examples like Flying Fox, Runamok, and The Management Game. A number of these are “small books,” and so brief that one hesitates to call them novels, but the definition of a novel is that of a “fictitious prose narrative of book length” (Oxford American Dictionaries), and lacking any better term, that’s what I will call them as a group.