A history book written thirty years ago can still be worth reading. A management book of the same age usually reads as a period document. The difference lies in what each one uses as evidence.
The evidence is a company still in motion
Business writing draws its authority from firms that are currently succeeding. The argument runs from observed excellence backwards to the practices assumed to have produced it.
Those firms keep trading after the book is printed. Some decline, some are acquired, and some are later found to have been succeeding for reasons the author did not describe.
When the example fails, the framework built on it loses its footing, even if the reasoning was sound at the time.
History and science do not carry this exposure. Their subject matter has already finished happening and cannot embarrass the author later.
Selection makes the problem worse
Exemplary companies are chosen because they are already outperforming. A firm at the top of its market has a good chance of drifting back towards the average regardless of its practices.
This means a set of celebrated case studies is close to a set of results likely to regress, which is a difficult foundation for a durable argument.
Readers rarely revisit an old business book to check, so the pattern repeats with each new cohort of admired firms.
The author is not being careless. There is no way to write about excellence without picking companies that are currently excellent.
Vocabulary ages visibly
Every few years the category adopts a new set of terms for organisational behaviour. The underlying observations often survive; the language does not.
A book saturated in the vocabulary of its decade signals its age on every page, which is enough to make a reader distrust content that may still hold.
History and popular science are written in comparatively plain language and escape this particular kind of decay.
Publishers accelerate the effect by titling books in the idiom of the moment, since a current-sounding title sells better in the year it is released.
Some parts of the shelf survive
Not all business writing ages equally. Titles about negotiation, accounting, attention, decision-making or the behaviour of groups draw on material that changes slowly.
Those books stay in print for decades and become the backlist that funds the category, while the celebration of particular firms turns over constantly.
The useful distinction is whether a book explains a durable human or financial mechanism, or documents a company that happened to be winning while the author was writing.