BOOK REVIEW: RICHARD DONKINreviews Glow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation and Successby Lynda Gratton; Prentice Hall; £14.99 (€17)

UNILEVER IS serious about its brands. I visited one of its UK factory sites a few years ago. In one of the senior managers’ offices, stacked end-to-end in place of books on his shelves, were boxes of soap powders and other cleaning products.

It is not surprising, therefore, to read in Lynda Gratton's book, Glow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation and Success, of two Unilever managers, one specialising in deodorants and one handling confectionery, getting together for a product-focused chinwag while attending one of the company's strategy development programmes.

It led to the confectionery manager inviting her colleague to visit the Wall’s development centre, where her team were working on chocolate flavourings for the Magnum ice-cream brand.

The upshot was that the two development teams, working together, came up with the Lynx chocolate-scented deodorant Dark Temptation, which became an instant success among teenage boys for the simple reason that boys know that girls like chocolate.

Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School, described these kinds of collaboration as “hot spots”, centres of excellence where teams bristle with creative energy, in her previous book Hot Spots.

People who are energised, innovative and successful, she writes, seem to glow. “You can see it in their faces; you can hear it in their voices,” she says. Some who don’t, she adds, “seem to be in a perpetual state of Big Freeze”. In her new book, the words “glow” and “big freeze” are given capital letters and italicised. This is not so troubling in the first few paragraphs, but when glowing, engaged employees “radiating positive energy” are leaping out of every page like the bunnies in a Duracell battery advertisement, it becomes difficult to relate her principles to the average workplace.

But this is not a book about average workplaces. Nor is it a book aimed specifically at managers. Glow has been designed for the growing self-help book market, particularly in the US, and it just may have been launched at the right time.

When companies almost everywhere are cutting their headcounts, surviving employees could be forgiven for feeling demotivated. It’s not so much that they are in a big freeze, but that they are rigid with fear.

In this book, however, we can discover that such sentiments may be less about the economy and more about “mindset”, another word beloved of human resources professionals – particularly those with a psychology background, as Gratton has.

In line with the self-help genre pioneered by Stephen Covey, with his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Gratton gives us three principles for the foundation of glowing: a co-operative mindset, jumping across worlds and igniting latent energy.

There are also “nine actions that will make you glow every day”. What are these actions? Prospective glowers will be relieved to find that there is nothing too profound. The first thing is to possess that aforementioned co-operative mindset, defined by a willingness to share information with others. It helps also to be good at conversation.

We know that it is possible for people to generate a kind of rhythm and satisfaction in their work. The art of shovelling, for example, was highlighted in Ifan Edwards’s 1947 book No Gold on My Shovel, while Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, wrote of the “blessed moments” to be experienced when wielding a scythe in a gang of farm workers.

But how many people will be in a position to find the glow of work described in this book? The concept of jumping across worlds, for example, turns out to be all about networking and discovering what Gratton calls “boundaryless places” by escaping the daily grind, possibly through a sabbatical – a diversion that would be easier to pursue in academia than in a call centre.

For many people, the only opportunity to create the fluid, boundaryless lifestyle envisaged here would be to chuck in their jobs – and that might not be such a good idea in the present climate.

Perhaps the strongest glow just now comes from a smouldering anger at the growing unemployment, and this book can’t fix that. – (Copyright Financial Times Limited 2009)