Wisdom from off the beaten track

These four new books fit the business/financial genre definition only if it's applied quite loosely. But don't despair, sometimes telling messages come from off the beaten track. These books have much to offer spenders, savers, workers, and managers.

At a quick glance (okay, even at a lingering look) these four also seem to have nothing in common with each other. But they do share something, despite the wide chasms in subject matter. They share a point of view that is somehow at odds with the status quo. The key value of each of these books is the ability to make us question long and reflexively held beliefs.

REVIEWS BY NEAL LIPSCHUTZ

Let's start with the fiction. Yes, fiction. God Is My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth purports to be the story of "Brother Ty" (it's short for tycoon), a man who abandons life too given to alcohol and Wall Street failure for the life of a monk. He joins a monastery in upstate New York. The monastery is on its last financial legs thanks to the horrific taste and quality of the wine the monks produce to support themselves. With some divine inspiration or, perhaps, intervention, Brother Ty orchestrates a few choice financial trades that gets the Monastery of Cana back on its economic feet. Overcome with wealth and confidence, the monks switch allegiance from the supreme being to best-selling self-help authors. From there, it's all downhill for the hapless brothers.

Christopher Buckley (author of the best-selling Thank You for Smoking) and John Tierney, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine, have produced a short, funny send-up of the notion that self-help gurus can solve all our problems. They also take on the idea that marketing and image are king (even if the products stink). This is a lightly told tale of self-delusion and warped values.


Calling a Halt to Mindless Change: A Plea for Commonsense Management, by British management consultant John Macdonald, is a much more traditional business book (for one thing, it's nonfiction). But it still shares with God Is My Broker a skepticism about business fads and one-stop solutions. Macdonald's beef is with the new-age management movements that have inundated us in recent years. He argues that successful companies are evolutionary, not revolutionary. The good ones don't turn themselves on their heads to re-engineer. They don't hand everything over to self-directed teams or quality circles. These and other management movements certainly have some positives to offer. Macdonald's salient point is that wise managements pick and choose aspects of these trends that seem right for their particular circumstances. They don't buy into a single program as a panacea. In Macdonald's words, companies should adapt, not adopt.

He's particularly down on downsizing. So what does Macdonald suggest? Long-tested concepts that align closely with common sense. He says a company's management should really live its mission statement (not just write one). He advocates working in a focused, long-term oriented, ethical way. He wants a management that really listens to its customers, that really trains and empowers employees to make important decisions and one that can see farther than the next quarter's bottom line. These are all noble goals to be sure, but notably easier to agree with than execute in the day-to-day hurly-burly of a large corporation.


A broader critique of the American style of capitalism is offered in Juliet B. Schor's The Overspent American: When the Cost of Lifestyle Overtakes the Value of Life. Six years ago, Schor, a Harvard University economist, made a big splash with the best-selling The Overworked American. In it she lent academic credence to a gut feeling shared by many but not widely articulated at the time: that Americans across a broad swath were being asked to devote more time and energy to work in a pattern that many found less rewarding and more exhausting. In this latest book, Schor takes on hyper-consumerism and makes the case against competitive buying.

Schor writes that an upscaling of competitive consumerism has settled on the land. Many people no longer merely try to keep up with the Joneses (they lived down the street and didn't have much more money than us, anyway). Now, Schor posits, we compete with idealized "friends" we meet on television or through advertising. The lifestyle depicted and of most influence is decidedly upper middle class. This leads to buying beyond our means, leaving stress, too many possessions, and too little satisfaction.

Schor also spends some time with "downshifters," people who have chosen to step off the perceived work-and-spend merry-go-round. They'll accept less income and fewer things for less stress and more time to smell the flowers. Schor aptly points out that such choices aren't automatic entrees into carefree, more genuine lives. One woman, for example, frets that she can no longer spend as much as other family members on holiday presents.

Give Schor credit for swimming against the tide. The buoyancy of financial markets combined with many years of low-inflation economic growth has many Americans feeling pretty complacent about their finances. They'll happily indulge the urge for another wide-screen TV. But Schor offers a counter-argument to the recent glories of the gross domestic product. She writes that the GDP "fails to factor in pollution, parental time with children, the strength of the nation's social fabric, or the chance of being mugged while walking down the street."

But what happens to economic growth if everyone takes Schor's advice and significantly cuts consumption? After all, two-thirds of the GDP consists of consumer spending. Schor devotes a few pages near the end of the book to argue not all that convincingly that growth and much lower consumer spending can co-exist.


Webonomics: Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web by business writer Evan I. Schwartz is not so much a critique of the economy as a guidepost to its possible future. In case you've been dwelling in a cave of late, the Internet is hot. Sizzling hot. The mere ".com" in a company name or announced plans by an established concern to enter the Internet fray is often enough to send a stock price skyrocketing. This despite the distinct lack of profits exhibited by many newer Internet-oriented companies.

Schwartz offers a knowledgeable guide to this new terrain. His essential point about this fledgling medium for commerce is a good one: you have to remember that the Internet is different. Start-up company and established retailer alike must deal with an audience, attitude, and set of expectations already established on the Web. Simply mimicking in cyberspace the way a company does business in the actual world is not likely to cut it.

Another key point stressed by Schwartz is that sellers of goods and services need to remember the Web is interactive. People want to participate, contribute, ask questions, and get quick answers. He writes: "Although great masses of people use it, the Web is not a mass medium and never will be. It's an interactive medium, a niche medium, and ultimately a personal medium in which every user's experience is different than every other's."

Schwartz also writes insightfully about the products and services that lend themselves most easily to the Internet (those that are "information-rich"). He talks about Web currencies, branding, consumer data, and a host of other subjects. Like all books about dynamic issues, the informed reader will know of certain developments that took place after the book was printed and bound. Still, Schwartz's vision transcends the occasional shifting detail and maintains its relevance even in the face of further technological change. This is quite a useful guide to where a lot of businesses may be headed.


Making the most of work

People spend more time working than doing anything else (including sleeping). So it's no surprise that there's a constant flow of books designed to help us make the most of the experience. Here are a few recent titles on the subject. Contented Cows Give Better Milk: The Plain Truth about Employee Relations and Your Bottom Line (Saltillo Press, $30, 1890651044), by Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden; Driving Fear out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization (Jossey-Bass, $20, 0787939684), by Kathleen D. Ryan and Daniel K. Oestreich; and Are You Paid What You're Worth? The Complete Guide to Calculating and Negotiating the Salary, Benefits, Bonus and Raise You Deserve (Broadway, $15, 0767901312), by Michael O'Malley.


Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

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