business books

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

>What color is your parody? Barbara Ehrenreich takes aim at business
success books, culling some of the genre's less enlightening lessons.
How Full Is Your Bucket, for instance, informs readers, "Everyone has
an invisible bucket. We are at our best when our buckets are
overflowing—and at our worst when they are empty." Meanwhile, The
Millionaire Mind explains that the universe "is akin to a big
mail-order department," that poor people are poor because they "choose
to play the role of the victim," and that the first step to success is
to repeat, "I admire rich people! I bless rich people! I love rich
people!"<

August 14, 2005/New York TIMES
Who Moved My Ability to Reason?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH

There they are, massed in every airport bookstore, their titles
lunging out to slap you in the face. Some are straight-out commands,
like ''First, Break All the Rules'' and ''Now, Discover Your
Strengths.'' Others pose quirky metaphorical questions: ''How Full Is
Your Bucket?'' or ''Who Moved My Cheese?'' Several of them trumpet
forth a kind of numerological majesty: ''The 8th Habit,'' ''The Five
Dysfunctions of a Team.'' All lay claim to the almost infinite
territory of ''work and life,'' as in the ''Cheese'' subtitle, ''An
A-Mazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life.''
Clearly you are not in the literature section, or even ordinary diet
and mood-boosting self-help; this is the bustling genre of business
success books, descended from Dale Carnegie's mid-20th-century oeuvre
and ready to transform you into a C.E.O. now.

Fortunately, these books are easy to read, since they're directed at
an audience more familiar with Power Point than Proust. Few words
clutter the pages of Spencer Johnson's mega-best-seller ''Who Moved My
Cheese?'' or his follow-up book, ''The Present,'' whose covers are
emblazoned with a kind of badge that reads ''a gem -- small and
valuable.'' In place of words, one often finds graphics, like the
little buckets that help fill the pages of ''How Full Is Your
Bucket?'' The caption on one tells us: ''Everyone has an invisible
bucket. We are at our best when our buckets are overflowing -- and at
our worst when they are empty.'' Even the unusually prolix 400 pages
of ''The 8th Habit'' are heavily padded with graphlike diagrams,
including one depicting a wrinkled sine wave -- or perhaps it's a
mountain -- labeled ''Passion.'' The mountain rises from a sea
swimming with ''positive'' words, like ''hope,'' ''synergistic,''
''fun'' and ''motivating.''

The few words that do appear in these books are likely to be bolded,
bulleted or boxed. Lists are unavoidable. ''Now, Discover Your
Strengths'' includes a list with 34 possible strength-related
''themes,'' from ''achiever'' to ''maximizer'' to ''woo.'' Chapters
are often embedded with simple exercises you can perform at home, like
this one from ''Secrets of the Millionaire Mind'': ''Place your hand
on your heart and say . . . 'I admire rich people!' 'I bless rich
people!' 'I love rich people!' 'And I'm going to be one of those rich
people too!' '' In some cases, the author seems ready to abandon print
altogether, ending the book with instructions to visit his Web site,
purchase his nonbook products or attend his motivational seminars (and
they are, in the current batch of business success books, always
''his''). For members of the postreading generation, ''How Full Is
Your Bucket?'' and ''The 8th Habit'' tuck in a convenient CD.

But why read these books at all? Herewith are ''The Five Essential
Principles of Business Success Books,'' conveniently condensed for
consumption in five minutes or less. Yes, they overlap and sometimes
contradict one another. No, the headings are not parallel, some being
nouns, some adjectives and some entire sentences. Welcome to the
genre!

The 24/7 Happy Hour. Be positive, upbeat and perky at all times. Once,
the job of corporate functionaries was to make things happen. Today,
their mission is apparently to keep their colleagues company in the
office. As ''How Full Is Your Bucket?'' asserts, ''Ninety-nine out of
every 100 people report that they want to be around more positive
people.'' Every book in the genre enjoins a relentless positivity of
outlook. In the ''Tuesdays With Morrie''-like fable of ''The
Present,'' the anonymous ''young man'' chirps to the wise ''old man,''
''So, if what I believe and do today is positive, I help create a
better tomorrow!''

In fact, negative thoughts -- as toward the boss who laid you off or
passed you over for a promotion -- will not only be visible to your
comrades, they ''can be harmful to your health and might even shorten
your life span.'' If you happen to be downsized, right-sized or
outsourced again, just grin and bear your smiley face to the next
potential employer, as the happy folks in ''We Got Fired! . . . And
It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us'' advise.

Avoid Victimism and Anyone Who Indulges in It. People who fail at
being positive -- and dwell morbidly on their last demotion or
downsizing, for example -- easily fall into what ''The 8th Habit''
diagnoses as ''the mind-set of victimism and culture of blame.'' Avoid
them, even though ''it's very easy to hang out and share suffering
with people who are committed to lose.'' Poor people, we discover in
''Secrets of the Millionaire Mind,'' are that way because they
''choose to play the role of the victim.'' Avoid them too.

Masters of the Universe. Being positive and upbeat not only improves
your health and popularity, it actually changes the world. Yes, your
thoughts can alter the physical universe, which, according to
''Secrets of the Millionaire Mind,'' ''is akin to a big mail-order
department,'' in which you '' 'order' what you get by sending
energetic messages out to the universe.'' The author ascribes this
wisdom to the ''Law of Attraction,'' which was explained
scientifically in the 2001 book ''The Ultimate Secret to Getting
Absolutely Everything You Want.'' Thoughts exert a gravitational-type
force on the world, so that ''whenever you think something, the
thought immediately attracts its physical equivalent.'' If you think
money -- in a totally urgent, focused and positive way, of course --
it will come flying into your pockets.

The Mice Come Out Ahead. Although the plot of ''Who Moved My Cheese?''
centers on two tiny, maze-dwelling, cheese-dependent people named Hem
and Haw, there are also two subsidiary characters, both mice. When the
cheese is moved, the tiny people waste time ranting and raving ''at
the injustice of it all,'' as the book's title suggests. But the mice
just scurry off to locate an alternative cheese source. They prevail,
we learn, because they ''kept life simple. They didn't overanalyze or
overcomplicate things.'' In the mysteriously titled ''QBQ! The
Question Behind the Question,'' we are told that questions beginning
with ''who'' or ''why'' are symptoms of ''victim thinking.'' Happily,
rodents are less prone to it than humans. That may be why we never
learn the identity of the Cheese Mover; the who-question reveals a
dangerous human tendency to ''overanalyze,'' which could lead you to
look upward, resentfully, toward the C-suites where the true Masters
of the Universe dwell.

Passionate. According to ''The 8th Habit,'' in the old days, it was
good enough to be effective. But ''being effective . . . is no longer
optional in today's world -- it's the price of entry to the playing
field.'' The endlessly churning, cutthroat, 21st-century business
world demands greatness -- which means being not only enthusiastic but
also passionate about your work. Presumably, you will pull
all-nighters, neglect your family -- whatever it takes. And when you
do lose your job, you will embrace your next one -- in, say, modular
building construction -- with the same raging passion for greatness.

There you have it, the five highly condensed secrets of business
success. If you find them immoral, delusional or insulting to the
human spirit, you should humbly consider the fact that, to judge from
the blurbs on the backs of these books, they have won the endorsement
of numerous actual C.E.O.'s of prominent companies. Maybe the books
tell us what these fellows want their underlings to believe. Be more
like mice, for example. Or -- and this is the truly scary possibility
-- maybe the principles embody what the C.E.O.'s themselves believe,
and it is in fact the delusional, the immoral and the verbally
challenged who are running the show.

Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, ''Bait and Switch,'' will be published
in September.

-- 
Jim Devine
"Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let
people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.