Do pop management books really address the true HRD issues of the day?

Pop goes the marketing weasel

Madhumita Chakraborty

What then is the right way of living?” Plato asks in his Dialogues and answers “Life must be lived as play”. Matt Weinstein and Dr Luke Barber, would have us believe though, that Plato had actually borrowed the quote from them, having checked it out first in a conversation in a dream.

The jocular introduction to Work Like Your Dog sets the tone for the rest of the book, which like most other me-toos in the popular management book market, is fun reading beneath the quilt (with a hot water bottle warming the ribs) on a cold December night. Rajiv Khurana’s Sweet and Sour Soup for the Executives is more in the league of the Jaspal Bhatti brand of humour. (Does our poker-faced television hero with the ready wit need an introduction?)

Publishers Excel Books claim that the Soup For Executives was already on the bestseller lists in Gujarat and why not? Most popular management books have sold like hot cakes in a books trade growing cold with recession. Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch has been a bestseller since it was launched and Kenneth Blanchard’s One Minute Manager has been a bestseller right through the year.

“These are the kind of books that executives like to pick up at the airport and read on flight,” says Excel Books managing director Anurag Jain, who has more books of the genre up his sleeve. Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch publisher Piyush Chawla of Vikas Publishing House feels that the pop management popularity is directly linked to the stress in the job market. “People are losing jobs, there is so much stress all around. So there is a market for good original Indian books on management,” says he.

Mr Chawla is probably right about the motivation for reading the plethora of “How-tos”, that range from How to live your life, Ask your boss for a raise, to How-to or sail up the corporate ladder like a kite on a windy day....The moot point really is whether these tremendous marketing phenomena, concocted by the equally successful management gurus and attitude pundits, really address the actual human resources issues of the day.

How about a book on How to lay off half your staff and still keep your stock prices bubbling on the bourses for instance? Or one on How to pick and choose from competing skill levels when CEO hollers the four letters S-A-C-K? A couple of years ago a book published in Sweden questioned the credibility of the attitude pundits.

Staffan Furustan’s Popular Management Books: How they are made and what they mean for the organisation (SCORE, Sweden) was rated as a “radical critique of the quick-fix solutions offered by popular management books.” The book attempted to correct the “under-researched truisms” of popular management books.

Since then a great many more pop management wonders have been born and bought by quick-fix addicts or frequent corporate travellers looking for tips for a leap forward, with a laugh thrown in for free. Work Like Your Dog, for instance, is the kind of book that makes the dreary hours of a long journey on train or an eight-hour flight to Europe fly past imperceptibly. It has the same gripping conviction of management workshops, that keep middle-aged, mid-career professionals enthralled for hours.

It is no coincidence that co-author Matt Weinstein is the founder and “emperor” of Playfair Inc., a management consulting company that presents team-building programmes across the world. Playfair clients include American Express, Andersen Consulting, AT & T, Dunn and Bradstreet Software, GE Capital, Lucent Technologies, McGraw-Hill, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Sheraton Hotels—and the advertising clubs of Bangalore and Kolkata.

Mr Weinstein is also the author of Managing To Have Fun and a frequent speaker on the corporate lecture circuit. Dr Luke Barber is a professor of philosophy at Richland College in Dallas, Texas, where he teaches both philosophy and ethics. The publishers introduce him as a man whose “previous careers as a child evangelist, a navy seaman, and a 100-mile ultra-marathon endurance runner have given him a unique perspective on learning to laugh and play with life’s problems.”
Say Mssrs Weinstein and Barber,”...if you really want to be successful, if you really want to get ahead, and if you really want to be happy in your job, then you have to learn to work like a dog. I hasten to add, however, that you must be very clear about how most dogs go about their work.” But, of course, they PLAY!

Other vignettes of corporate wisdom include commandments like “a workplace that is filled with wrinkled brows does not necessarily lead to a profitable bottom line. In fact, the opposite is often true”. A great many employer attitudes cited in the book, like the Sprint model, make solid corporate commonsense, Sprint’s vice-president of engineering and technical support for the western United States observes ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work Days’, sends dried flower wreaths to wives of employees working weekends, and celebrates holidays like Easter at the workplace.

The general manager of the radio station KLDE in Houston, Kris McMurray, has solved her problem of weak staff on Fridays. The first Friday of every month is stress-release day at the radio station. Apart from a free luncheon for her 40 employees, “mission accomplished” awards for sales and promotion, she also hires a masseuse for neck and shoulder massages on request. A bootblack roams the station, ready to shine shoes and employee cars in the driveway get a free wash. Of course, the radio station is no longer short-staffed on Fridays!

Employees would love to sell some of the fun ideas in the book to employers, like the one on taking “the company on a shopping spree”. The chapter heading was inspired by Migra Textiles mill owner Mike Philips. Mr Philips took his entire staff on a shopping spree on the tenth anniversary of the Cape Town textile mill.

The mill workers were given an hour to spend South African rands worth $ 200 at a shopping mall. They had to buy at least five different things and the unspent money had to be returned. The anniversary game kept the mill working when all other South African mills went on strike the following month.

If Messrs Weinstein and Barber mesmerise with their frequent evocation of Plato, Socrates, Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud, the Sweet And Sour Soup for the Executives author borrows his mantras and couplets from Lord Krishna and Sant Kabira. Rajiv Khurana is a management consultant, trainer, newspaper columnist and television anchor and head of the Delhi-based management consultants, The Personnel Lab.

“Had it been easy for people to change a person’s attitude, Lord Krishna could have changed Duryodhana, and the Mahabharata could have been avoided,” says he. The morale of the tale and the chapter heading is “hire for attitude, train for skills.” Mr Khurana’s book is really targeted at Indian employers and managers and focusses entirely on Indian conditions.

Like Work Like A Dog, most of the recipes in the Sweet And Sour Soup are intended for the boss, or more specifically for the employer. Not all of Mr Khurana’s chapters end with a morale (even though all the chapters do begin with a quote). Some of his chapters simply dwell on the Indian psyche, forewarning potential HRD chiefs of the types parading around the job marketplace.

Vilayati Ram, for instance, is fond of MTV, Star TV and sports a similar accent (not counting minor slips where his vee sounds like bee). He usually has an uncle in Vancouver. Ishtile Bhai dons an Amir Khan, Ajay Devgan or Govinda mantle for the interview and slips back into his everyday personality afterwards. Hinglis Man is a “post-graduate in English in Hindi medium” and so speaks Hindi Khichri. Then there are ceiling-watchers, stinkee and the copy book man....

In the perfect world of perfect people (wilting for want of ideas and fun) that Mr Weinstein and Dr Barber weave, the simple formulae for rejuvenating tired minds and hence enhancing productivity at the workplace, seem plausible. Like the day-long workshops for managers, the magic wears off slowly and certainly before you have sold your boss the shopping spree solution to questionable loyalty among staff.
Even though, Mr Khurana does not offer any sugar-syrup solutions to human resource issues, or because of it, the Indian soup is somewhat more credible than the American Dog, hot though it is and full of fun and frolic. Neither book rate as the bible of the young-manager-in-a-hurry, but both promise chuckles in these dreary times.

Work Like Your Dog —50 Ways To Work Less, Play More And Earn More by Matt Weinstein and Luke Barber; East West Books;
Rs 250; Pp 259

Sweet And Sour Soup For The Executives — Great Recipes For Success In Life, Business and Career; Excel Books; Rs 150; Pp 252