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Business books: Kicking ass in an unflat world
GIVING crisp, new $100 bills to people willing to pay $27 for your book might seem to be an act of desperation. But only the first 100 customers got lucky, and the giveaway, a promotional stunt for a new book by Donald Trump, an American property magnate, sent a clear message: buying “Think Big and Kick Ass” will make you considerably richer.

This latest tome from The Donald offers shocking revelations (Lee Iacocca, a legendary tough guy and former boss of Chrysler, is a cry-baby), invaluable advice on when to get even (always) and reasons to get a prenuptial agreement (“Look at Paul McCartney, the poor bastard”). It is not the only business book that is soaring up the bestseller lists: so are Alan Greenspan's surprisingly readable memoir, “The Age of Turbulence”, and Timothy Ferriss's “The 4 Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich”, among others. Business books, it seems, are booming again. Click here to find out more!

“Business books as a category track the stockmarket—they just do,” says Adrian Zackheim, formerly of HarperCollins and now head of Portfolio, the business-book arm of Penguin. “If stocks are rising, companies are feeling optimistic about their prospects and expense accounts are bigger, people believe there are more opportunities,” he says. Sales plunged after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, only started to pick up again in 2004, and have so far been unaffected by the recent troubles in the housing market and on Wall Street, which have “just given people new things to write about,” says Mr Zackheim.

Books lionising celebrity bosses also fell from grace after the last boom, but “maybe we are also seeing a resurgence of the cult of personality,” suggests David Goehring, director of the Harvard Business School Press. Harvard does not publish such books, but has been “on a roll” for the past four years, he says. International sales have been especially strong, particularly in China and other parts of Asia, as have online sales.

There is also growing demand from overloaded executives for shorter books. So in January Harvard will launch a new hardback series, “Memo to the CEO”, covering subjects such as lessons from private equity and the future of strategy. Each book will be about 100 pages long and will cost $20. In a similar vein, Harvard has adopted the approach taken by iTunes to pop albums, and has started to sell individual chapters of books online—an idea that has been a hit with academics in particular.

Harvard published the book that marked the peak of the previous cycle, reportedly paying a huge advance to Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School, for “Leading the Revolution”, which lionised Enron just as the energy-trading firm entered its death spiral. It has just published Mr Hamel's latest book, “The Future of Management”, which addresses the question posed by the new boom in business books: are all these words making executives any wiser?

“Management is out of date,” Mr Hamel writes. “Like the combustion engine, it's a technology that has largely stopped evolving, and that's not good.” He argues that there has been precious little innovation in management thinking in the past 20 or 30 years. So what is the future of management? Alas, Mr Hamel does not know—or, if he does, he would rather not say after his embarrassing endorsement of Enron. “My goal in writing this book was not to predict the future of management, but to help you invent it,” he writes. Things to bear in mind as you do, he says, include the need for your company to have purpose, to seek out ideas from the fringes, and to embrace the democratising power of the internet—none of which will be news to anyone who has been in business for more than a few minutes.

Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School argues that there is a huge opportunity to define the new vocabulary for management in the 21st century, much as happened a century ago around the birth of the bureaucratic large corporation. He has just published a fascinating history of business education, “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands”, which charts the rise and fall of the attempt to create a science of management. In the early 20th century researchers coined such phrases as “hierarchy of goals”, “management by objective” and “matrix organisation”. New terms borrowed from the field of technology are entering the language today, such as network, open-source and collaborative (not to mention think big and kick ass), but these have yet to be defined with enough rigour to allow meaningful comparisons of different companies, says Mr Khurana.

That is demonstrated by Mr Hamel's latest book, which provides fascinating case studies of firms such as Google, Whole Foods Market and Gore-Tex, but draws no conclusion and finds no common factor other than that none of their innovative founders—Sergey Brin and Larry Page, John Mackey and Bill Gore—went to business school. Mr Khurana worries that business-school academics have become too entrenched in their narrow disciplines to play the leading role they once did in defining a new body of management science for practitioners.

His colleague, Pankaj Ghemawat, has written a new book that comes encouragingly close to that ideal. He convincingly challenges, in a readily accessible way, the thrust of Thomas Friedman's hugely popular book, “The World is Flat”. Differences between countries matter enormously, Mr Ghemawat explains, and unless companies seek to understand those differences—which can be cultural, administrative, geographic or economic—their global strategies are likely to fail.

Particularly revealing is Mr Ghemawat's account of how Coca-Cola has gradually developed a global strategy that “neither ignores the differences across countries nor caves in to them entirely—that is, it recognises the reality of semiglobalisation.” This book deserves to be a bestseller, but it may be hamstrung by its strikingly boring title, “Redefining Global Strategy”. If Mr Ghemawat really wanted to think big and kick ass, he should have called it “The World is Not Flat”.

Original version from [|The Economist, 1 November 2007]

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