Old Snake-Oil, New Bottles...

I've got to the section in 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World' on Success manuals and the 'new thinking' way of management. It's making for good reading (more so than the earlier chapter on 980s economics which didn't really interest me as much.

It'd be funnier if it wasn't so tragic...


The market for platitudes became so crowded that ever more exotic angles were required to catch the eye of airport browsers. In the words of Mike Fuller, author of Above the Bottom Line, 'you have to have a shtick of some kind'. One promising approach, as the emphasis shifted from 'management' to 'leadership', was to seek out historical analogies...

The pioneer here was Wess Robert (or Wess Robert PhD as he styled himself, forgetting that non-medical 'doctors' who insist on drawing attention to their postgraduate qualification - Henry Kissinger in the US, Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland - always bring disaster in their wake: it's tantamount to having the warning 'This Man is Dangerous' tattooed on one's forehead).

Robert's book 'The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun' appeared in 1991 and soon found its way on to the bookshelves of every middle manager in the United States. Described as a 'fantastic' guide which 'will help you make the most of your leadership potential', it vouchsafed these truly fantastic discoveries: 'You must have resilience to overcome personal misfortunes, discouragement, rejection and disappointment'; 'When the consequences of your actions are too grim to bear, look for another option.'

Could anything be sillier? You bet: other authors have since come up with Gandhi: The Heart of an Executive, Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Make It So: Management Lessons from 'Star Trek the Next Generation', Elizabeth I CEO and Moses: CEO. The Ten Commandments, we now learn, were the world's first mission statement...

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