Business Books: Viagra for the Soul
Posted Tue Feb 27 17:57:49 2001 by steveg |
By Steve Gilliard
Modern business books will cure your ills, make you a new man and stick billions in your pocket. In effect, they are the male self-help book. They help men feel in control of their career and thus, provide self-esteem. The are the I'm OK, you're OK of the new millenium. A list member of ours had recently been forced to read one of these things and it reminded me of the bad old days where I used to read these things for a job
Now, before you accuse me of sounding like Oprah, let's face facts. Modern business books have nothing to do with business, but with how people see their role in it.They boil down into several categories:
1) The New Idea: These books are the magic diet powder of the male psyche. The best of these books was John T. Malloy's Dress for Success. First published in 1975, it transformed the idea of business dress. The shapeless sack suit was banished, rules codified for what to wear and it ultimately led to the 80's chic of women in manish suits with large bow ties. Malloy was no idiot. He knew what he was doing, reimposing order after the chaos of the 1960's.
2) The Hero Businessman: Iacocca was the first of these books, and the genre has grown like foot fungus in a swamp. Because business is work, not liberating Kuwait or making dinner for the President. Iacocca was made a hero by saving Chrysler, which is now owned by the warm and caring Germans. But the book started a trend that every successful businessman, and some deluded ones, would want their own ghostwriter. Trump's The Art of the Deal was a noxious low. For every decent book, 20 flood the market. If the dotcom boom had lasted another year, we would have read about the wit and wisdom of Jeff Bezos and Candace Carpenter. The most embarassing entry here is The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. Uh, no. It was old and fell apart like a Russian suit in the rain.
3) The Rise of the Company: Kara Swisher's AOL, now seen to be a monstrous joke, is a good example of this genre. Her nearly hagiograhpic history of a company now accused of vast and ongoing labor rights violations is the kind of embarassment that shouldn't be lived down. She talked to the bosses and charted the deals and missed the story. Unless you're going to ask real questions, you might as well just ghostwrite.
4) The Military Leader: These books are particularly offensive. Whether it is manage like a SEAL or Marine, these books miss the basic core idea that the military lives by a code of ethics and has smarter managers than most companies. Most companies have no clue as to the kind of moral burden a military commander has and the generally high level of education among senior military leaders. No one dies if you lose an account. Don't take that hill and your whole platoon of teenagers could wind up in Arlington. Why not write books called "Run your business like a brain surgeon." It would be far less offensive to the memory of the fallen.
5) The Leadership Book: Usually pithy comments on how not to act like a complete asshole when running a company. Well, I guess dotcom owners never read these things. They actually have good advice, if you follow them. Few do.
6) The Improvement Guide: The first of these books was How to Win Friends and Influence People, but the genre has had a long and healthy history in the bookstores of America. Unlike the new idea, these play on traditional themes of making yourself better. Malloy was about externals, which was new, these are about internals. Make yourself better, manage like Jesus, and you'll feel better.
7) The Guru: Tom Peters, Faith Popcorn, Bill Gates. They all spout obvious bullshit to the gullible. People need secular faith and Bill Gates is as good a touch stone as any for one. They explain chaos to those searching for order in a confusing, orderless world. They have succeeded and if you listen to them, you will too. They establish a new faith for the fallen and embracing it will save you. Of course, they know less about the workaday world than your children, but you gotta serve somebody.
Look, the best books are those which have practical value. A book of case studies will teach you more about business than any hoked up guide sold in a bookstore. Some books are really worth your time, like The Organization Cult, but they are few and far between. The more experience that the writer has in the real world then the more likely the story will be more than masturbation in print. Much of what is sold is no more relevant to your life than Oprah minus Dr. Phil.
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Name: Dave
Email:
Date: Fri Mar 2 12:50:12 2001
Comment: "Management loves Dilbert. "
Not all managements. But point taken. It depends whether you are outside looking in, or inside looking - wherever. If you're stuck in a cubicle, isn't everything ersatz anyway?
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Name: beammeup
Email: no@intelligentlife.net
Date: Fri Mar 2 08:32:41 2001
Comment: Dilbert is propaganda designed to be displayed in office cubicles as ersatz protest. Management loves Dilbert.
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Name: Dave
Email:
Date: Thu Mar 1 15:37:44 2001
Comment: Don't forget the backlash against all the corpspeak bullshit and doubletalk: Dilbert, celebrant of corpstupidity, management-malspeak and a massive merchandising phenomenon in its own right.
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Name: Carl Guderian
Email: carlg@vermilion-sands.com
Date: Thu Mar 1 10:17:59 2001
Comment: Don't laugh yet. Coming your way, insha'llah, someday will be "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Terrorists," by Osama bin Laden. According to a recent International Herald Tribune, a defector from his organization went to the CIA and told them that the organization was run pretty much like a business. There were safehouses to run, training camps to organize, front businesses to run like real businesses (not like most dotcoms). Like many employees, our defector learned that someone else was making more for the same work. I suppose middle management needs to deploy the suicide commandos (THAT's like a dotcom).
Habit 1: If you're trying to quit smoking, let your partner plant the bomb.
Habit 2: Allow extra time to get to your destination. You still get to Paradise if your truck bomb goes off early (partial credit for effort), but you'll still have to face your manager in Paradise.
And so on.
Did I post this to another thread already? It belongs in this one anyway.
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Name: DEEPGHETTO CORRESPONDENT
Email:
Date: Thu Mar 1 04:37:37 2001
Comment: STEVE G. Wonderfull,this trend has been around in various forms since the "Businessman as cult hero" '70's.Remember "BOONE",jeez what a POS.Some of these so-called management guru's would probably try(as actually happened)to spin Jay Gould as a capital formator!!!
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Name: Fabio
Email:
Date: Wed Feb 28 16:37:58 2001
Comment: Business Fantasy - I've been looking for a new genre in which to exercise my literary skills. I'll start posing for the cover right away.
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Name: steve gilliard
Email: sgilliard@netslaves.com
Date: Wed Feb 28 12:13:48 2001
Comment: There are good business books. Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker comes to mind, Steven Levy's Hackers, the problems come when the books turn from sound business thinking to self-help drivel. No one needs to use Attila the Hun's methods in business. Why not Sepp Dietrich or Vlad the Impaler? They were also butchers.
The difference is that the good book will step back and look at the subject with some perspective or tell a good story. A bad one is propeganda for sale.
Even though they veer towards Oprahish self-help, Suze Orman's financial books tend to have sound financial advice and talks to its target audience in a compelling, clear way. The difference between that and the CEO porn is that common sense is common sense and lies are lies.
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Name:
Email:
Date: Wed Feb 28 10:03:21 2001
Comment: warm and fuzzy?
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Name: nan
Email:
Date: Wed Feb 28 09:29:47 2001
Comment: I still have trouble understanding how anyone named Faith Popcorn can be taken seriously as a person, let alone as a predictor of so-called trends.
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Name: r.u.happy
Email: glad@prozac.com
Date: Wed Feb 28 08:22:06 2001
Comment: you'll be writing one soon eh. . .
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Name: mrcovey
Email:
Date: Wed Feb 28 02:44:33 2001
Comment: um. Stephen Covey sold millions of books...7 Habits... someone must be buying them.
also, i heard of this site called amazon.com they
seem to sell books.
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Name:
Email:
Date: Wed Feb 28 01:26:14 2001
Comment: never give advice, the wise don't need it, and the weak don't heed it...
Al Snow, professional wrestler...
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Name: Doug Heath
Email: dkheath@home.com
Date: Wed Feb 28 00:50:51 2001
Comment: The funny thing I find about the whole range of business/self-improvement books is the claim they make, implicitly or explicitly, that the solution to all one's personal needs or problems is to be found in business. That seems to be a false promise of the highest order since business is the area of our lives most of us have the least control over, unless we happen to be one of the CEO supermen so lovingly portrayed in the pages of one of those books. Perhaps "business fantasy" would be a more appropriate name for the genre.
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Name: dotcommie
Email: commie@youworkit.com
Date: Tue Feb 27 22:10:55 2001
Comment: The funny thing about the Tom Peters book is this ...
I suspect that many of the people who claim to have read them didn't. I've read most of them ... and what Peter's describes is far different than the reality of most of the dotcoms.
Give Peters his chops for truly valuing people in the company. Most dotcoms were run by people who act like they were raised by wolves.
Commie
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