Kanika Datta: Written down value

Are you or your colleagues and/or employees horses or donkeys? Mice or a dwarfs (or Little People, to use the politically correct term)? Runners, joggers, walkers, drivers? Couldn't care less? Writers of self-help/inspirational management books would be gravely concerned. How is it possible to run an organisation without categorising people thus? Or learning about Leadership and other Secrets from Highly Effective People? Do you know that Change Is The Only Constant, How To Lead From The Front or Get Things Done Flawlessly?

One of the curious paradoxes is that this genre of management literature has enjoyed a recrudescence over the past eight years just as the global economy has been becalmed by the global financial crisis. Equally remarkable is the fact that in a world that demands game-changing innovation in thought and ideas at a faster pace than ever before, they all reliably follow a pattern.

The more dominant trend is the straight motivational type of kunji replete with down-home wisdom. The alarming frequency with which these books now appear on book review editors' desks suggest that they either meet an urgent market demand or are simply easier to write. A bit of both, maybe. After all, Who Moved My Cheese?, the late nineties bestseller, remains a durable success with its multi-lingual translations, including in Chinese, Hindi (titled, hilariously, Mera Cheese Kisne Hataya?), Gujarati and even Arabic.

Cheese built on the trend-setters in this business, The One Minute Manager and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, written in the eighties. The latter book was such a hit that Stephen Covey's son Sean felt moved to extend the franchise with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, following it up with a flurry of teen advisories through the first decade of this century, though he did vary things a bit with The 6 Most Important Decisions You'll Ever Make: A Guide for Teens and another that purported to be a "personal workbook".

The very latest self-helper to hit the stands is Move Your Bus - it's the one that divides employees into walkers, joggers etc and follows the same model as Cheese and the 7 series. What does it offer? "The strategies and techniques you'll need to inspire employees and team leaders alike to work harder and smarter, maximize team performance and take your organization where you want to go," to quote the publicity literature and it's been endorsed by none other than Mr Covey Jr. It tells you in 144 pages of Aesop's Fable-type prose why you want runners and not walkers and riders in your organisation. Sample: "Within every type of organization, it is the Runners, like Rufus, who provide the locomotion. These individuals are working as hard as possible, and they essentially carry the load of the bus. They come early or they stay late. They never complain, and they provide a positive spirit. Their work ethic is strong, and their attention to detail is spot on…."

The second type of inspirational management book is the memoir-tutorial by or on successful managers and entrepreneurs. Mark McCormack was by no means the first but his brash and entertaining What They Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School set a trend in memoirs masquerading as management advisories that enterprising B-school professor types rapidly picked up on. To be sure there are many decent business autobiographies that perform the same function - Lou Gerstner's Who says Elephants Can't Dance? on IBM's turnaround being a good example - but they tend to be less didactic and utilitarian.

In more recent times, America's tech giants - from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - have provided fertile ground for such "how tos". In that respect, Steve Jobs death proved to be a money spinner. Walter Isaacson's door-stopper authorised biography didn't stop a litter of books purporting to explain why Jobs was the phenomenon he was, the subtext being: You Could Be the Next Jobs. The latest to cash in on this robust peripheral industry in Job-mania is a triple humdinger called Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs. What are these lessons? "Look Forward, Reason Back" (i.e. you need a vision), "Make Big Bets without Betting the Company" (another way of saying entrepreneurs should think big)… you get the drift.

Both books unwittingly betray the fundamental weakness of self-help management literature: they cloak hackneyed concepts in elaborate prose or in painfully patronising parables. The trouble is they have come to dominate a market starved of rigorous and thought-provoking management books. Gary Hamel and Jim Collins, where are you!