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Would you buy a way of life from a guru?
...In 1982 a young management consultant from McKinsey & Co, Thomas J Peters, co-wrote In Search of Excellence, a relentlessly optimistic primer which celebrated America's best companies and sought to identify the secrets of their success. As the Economist noted, Peters had "a knack of saying the right thing at the right time": In Search of Excellence was published in the very week unemployment in the US reached its highest level since the 1930s, and it found a ready audience in a nation worried about declining competitiveness but sick of hearing about the Japanese miracle. (Perhaps Peters had learned from the precedent of Dale Carnegie, whose equally cheerful and vastly popular How to Win Friends and Influence People had appeared in 1936, in the depths of the Depression.) In Search of Excellence sold five million copies, and Peters used the proceeds to buy a 1,300-acre farm in Vermont, complete with cattle and llamas.

After that, the deluge: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey; The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge; The One-Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson; Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins ... The New York Times list of non-fiction bestsellers soon became so clogged with inspirational tracts that the paper established a separate category for "Advice, How-to and Miscellaneous". 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, though the history usually turned out to be a mere promotional gimmick rather than a serious examination of past experience. The pioneer here was Wess Roberts, whose book The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun appeared in 1989. 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 Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors; Make It So: Leadership Lessons from "Star Trek the Next Generation"; The Heart of an Executive: Lessons on Leadership From the Life of King David; and Moses: CEO. The 10 commandments, we now learn, were the world's first mission statement. ...