John Brooks

John Brooks was an American business journalist whose Business Adventures — a collection of New Yorker profiles of corporate disasters and triumphs from the 1950s and 1960s — was named by both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as the best business book they ever read.

John Brooks spent most of his career as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote long-form profiles of American corporations, executives, and financial events. Business Adventures (1969) collects twelve of these pieces, covering incidents from the 1950s and 1960s: the Ford Edsel’s catastrophic failure, the crash of 1962, a price-fixing conspiracy in the electrical industry, Xerox’s transformation from a small company to a corporate giant, and other stories about how American capitalism actually worked in the postwar period.

The book was out of print for decades before Bill Gates mentioned it in a 2014 blog post as the best business book he had ever read, and that Warren Buffett had recommended it to him. The resulting interest in the book brought it back into print and established it as an unlikely classic of business writing. Gates cited its insight into the human dynamics of large organizations — the gap between corporate structure and actual behavior — as what made it lasting.

Brooks’s journalism has qualities rare in business writing: it reads like literature. The profiles are built on reporting — interviews, documents, research — but structured and written with the care of essays. His interest is in the human drama of organizational life: why capable people fail, why institutions behave irrationally, how decisions that seem sensible in the moment generate unforeseen consequences. Business Adventures holds up not because its subjects are still current — many are obscure — but because the human patterns it documents are permanent.