Gurus, experts, sages open up an economy of words

Successful Business Plans in a week, Understanding Total Quality Management in a week . . . The business shelves of city centre bookshops are stocked with the latest "how to" quick fix guides to economic glory.

If a week is too long, then 30 Minutes. . . To Make Yourself Richer should cover the basics.

"Every facet of business has its own cult book, its own guru," says Mr Ian MacKenzie, a senior bookseller at Hodges Figgis in Dublin. Warren Buffett is the finance guru, William Ury is the negotiating guru, and Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is one of several management gurus.

Many of the messages on offer are the same, just packaged differently, according to Mr Andrew McLaughlin, a management specialist at the Irish Management Institute.

"Some of the books in the softer skills areas like communications would tend to draw on the same sources of wisdom," he says.

Some of these sources of wisdom may prove slightly more surprising and dated than others. "The Celts were renowned for their business acumen long before our boardrooms became our battlegrounds," asserts the blurb to a book of Celtic business proverbs.

Books on sale in the general market are often mixes of popular psychology and the occasional economic maxim. Financial innovation equals personal "innervation".

One self-help guide - Who Moved My Cheese? - is a best-seller in the US business sales charts since 1998. A stress reduction parable, it features four characters who all cope with varying levels of success when the "cheese" they need for nourishment is moved to a different part of their "maze".

Its author originally used "cheese" as a metaphor for health or peace of mind, until writer Kenneth Blanchard started telling the story to business audiences. "We're always out of it," says Mr MacKenzie in Hodges Figgis. "We order 20, but then we'll get a corporate order, and we're out of it again."

Often, senior business managers are several steps ahead of the mainstream retailers, with word of influential Silicon Valley authors like Jeffrey Moore and Clayton Christensen spreading over the Internet.

"They're not the kind of books business managers would go into Waterstones and pick up," says Mr Frank Roche, head of the Department of Business Administration in the Smurfit Business School in UCD.

Some publications achieve cross-over success, though, appearing both on book stands and academic reading lists. "Kenneth Blanchard's books on organisational behaviour have broad popular appeal across the spectrum," Mr McLaughlin suggests. "They're very readable for any senior manager not willing to read a 500 page textbook."

Blanchard's bestseller, The One Minute Manager, makes the 30 Minutes . . . series sound like procrastination.

Big names such as Peter Drucker and Charles Handy are "very good writers who get their message across", according to Prof Roy Green, head of the Department of Management in NUI Galway's faculty of commerce, while Frank Roche cites Gary Hamel's strategy book, Leading the Revolution, on how to avoid becoming a "one-vision wonder". America is "where the factory for books is", Mr Roche concludes. "It's hard to get very good books out of the European situation, because there isn't the same amount of research going on, but in America there is a strong publish-or-perish environment for academics," he adds.

Books like Leading Change by John Kotter indicate the prominence of the Harvard Business School for Mr McLaughlin, but he also emphasises the influence of the British psychologist and "mind mapping" authority, Tony Buzan.

At NUI Galway, Prof Green tries to balance the heavy weighting in favour of American texts with European writers.

As the leading global economic power, it is hardly surprising that the majority of writers in fields such as strategy, innovation and technology management are American and use US-based companies as case studies. Is this really a problem?

Oak Tree Press, Ireland's main publisher of business titles for the past decade, believes it is. "A lot of our earlier books had `Irish' or `in Ireland' in the title," says Mr Brian O'Kane, Oak Tree's managing director. "The same topics would be covered elsewhere, but here it would be with an Irish focus."

This focus is less global in ambition. "Many of the books that come from America, and less so England, are directed at the bigger companies," Mr O'Kane surmises.

Hot topics like "intrapreneurship" - or entrepreneurship within a company - and "six sigma", a recent trend in strategic management publishing, still find their way across the Atlantic into the larger Dublin bookshops.

One publishing trend that seems certain to continue is the search for "another No Logo". Naomi Klein's book on branding and labour exploitation is classed as a cultural studies book by Waterstones, but sales charts for a recent four-week period in its Dawson Street branch in Dublin show some of the best-sellers in its business section share Klein's agenda.

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser has sold more than three times as many copies as its nearest rival, a college textbook, and Noreena Hertz's The Silent Take- over, subtitled "Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy", is also performing well.

In the mainstream book market, then, it is in the "anti-business" rather than the business field where sales are heading skyward.

But slender, pocket-sized books on how to start your own business remain steadily popular. As the department manager in Chapters bookshop says: "There is always someone new coming along."

Somehow, the publication of 30 Minutes . . . To Plan an Anti-Capitalist Demonstration still seems like a distant prospect.