Stories – like values – are fundamental to everything. But too much, and it’s like eating two roast dinners or too much sugary cereal. You feel a bit grim (and a bit confused). And this is the problem with the modern business book.

I have been trying to read one particular bestseller for six months and I keep putting it down with a belch. Apologies for the crude expression.

It starts with the story of a childhood injury that lands the writer in a coma. Now let’s imagine that single fact, the injury, sitting at the bottom of a pit while the writer piles shovel-loads of miserable dirt on top of it. His sister’s (eventually successful) battle with cancer ten years before. Sitting in the same hospital, his poor parents being comforted by the same priest, fearing for the life of another child. The painful recovery, during which we are spared no medical detail. The thwarted sporting ambitions – he had hoped to follow his father into a professional career but couldn’t even get on the school team. Et-bloody-cetera.

So you’ve endured the story. Can we now get to the practical specifics? No. Now we have the story of how he turned himself around – becoming the best athlete in the history of everywhere. And then we get the story of how he started writing about how he achieved this, becoming, in the process, the most successful writer in the history of writing – and here we get subscription figures and sales figures and follower numbers which start to gross me out as much as the tale of the eye that nearly fell out of his head earlier. More people than have ever lived go on his website every day, it seems.

So, after many paragraphs, we know he suffered adversity and we know he is a really super-successful hero of a person. We then get to stories about the importance of good habits. We hear (again) about Dave Brailsford, the cycling coach – with several pages on the aggregation of marginal gains, from heated pants to comfy pillows and well-lubed tyres. And we hear at least ten different metaphors on why good habits matter and why they’re hard to form. And I’m sorry, but did that point really need making? Are there people who really need persuading that it can be hard to lose weight and prioritise the difficult and the boring?

The bottom line for me is that stories are incredibly powerful, and, to an extent, they are a key part of daily conversations we have with clients. At the same time, they shouldn’t take up all the oxygen, leaving nothing left for actual insight and practical content. The writer who I am (playfully, I promise!) showcasing above undoubtedly has some excellent insight. I just couldn’t get to it without holding my breath for long enough.