Name: Business Adventures
Age: 43
Appearance: Electronic but coming soon in paperback.
Oh God, it's not another bestselling business book, is it? "Be Lean! Be Tough! Be a Leader! Don't Go to College But if You Do, Go to Yale! Sit at the Front! Win Friends! Influence People! Have Seven Highly Effective Habits! Move My Cheese!" Yes, it is.
What's this one's USP? Well, Bill Gates wrote on his blog recently …
Bill Gates has a blog? Yes, Gates Notes.
Really? He couldn't manage Gates Posts? Gateposts? Get it? I do. Apparently, that opportunity for a cheap pun passed him by. Regardless, he called it the best business book he's ever read. Warren Buffett lent it to him 23 years ago.
I bet people started snapping it up after that. It has been out of print for decades.
Don't tell me – Wall Street suits have descended on secondhand bookshops and caused a brisk and unexpected spike in the market? Not quite, but the digital publisher Open Road Media did quickly step in. It reproduced it as an e-book that has shot up the charts and become No 1 on Amazon and No 2 on the New York Times bestseller lists. John Murray is publishing a print version in Britain.
So, is it any good? Do we ever find out the seven most effective ways to move someone's cheeses and influence people? No. It comprises accounts of 12 key moments in American industry, including the Ford Edsel failure, the rise of Xerox and Piggly Wiggly, and the GE and Texas Gulf Sulphur scandals. It was written by John Brooks, a writer for the New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s. And, yes, it is actually very good.
That's a surprise. How so? Imagine a post-war Michael Lewis. He likens the New York stock exchange to a "sociological test tube, forever contributing to the human species' self-understanding" and calls the stock market "the daytime adventure serial of the well-to-do".
But it's 43 years old! That's about 306 in business years. Is it still relevant? It's not about investment strategy, management theory or any of that stuff. It's about how brilliant, stupid, cooperative, mulish, irrational and sage people can be. It seems that time moves on, but people don't really change that much.
Do say: "This is a book of eternal truths!"
Don't say: "No, seriously – who moved my cheese?"
