YOU IS THE NEW ME

Lucy Kellaway on business manuals

that tell managers how to market Brand You'

IN the last few months one million Ameri- cans, mostly men and mostly executives, have each handed over $19.95 in exchange for a slim volume called Who Moved My Cheese? This nifty little book, just 94 pages of big writing, contains a simple parable about two mice and two miniature human beings who are placed in a maze where they set off to look for cheese. They find the cheese, enjoy it, but after a while it gets moved. So they start to look for it again.

The book takes about as long to read as it takes to watch an episode of Coronation Street, only it is rather less demanding. It offers one simple lesson — most of us find change pretty difficult, but if we accept it and even anticipate it, so much the better. This lesson is bleedingly obvious and the parable clunky. 'It is safer to search in the maze than remain in the cheeseless situation,' it says, the words taking up an entire page.

Yet this book is a business-publishing sensation. Big-cheese executives swear by it. Companies buy it in bulk for employees they are about to lay off, in the vain hope it will soften the blow. Even in Britain, where we fancy ourselves above this sort of thing, Who Moved My Cheese? is selling.

There is a second lesson in this book, and it has nothing to do with change or with cheese. It has to do with the reading matter of managers.

Over the last decade of writing about management for the Financial Times, I have become an unwilling expert in man- agement books. Every post brings new, unsolicited examples of the genre. The lat- est batch contains titles such as The Inno- vation Premium: How Next Generation Companies Are Achieving Peak Perfor- mance, or Bullseye: How To Hit Every Strategic Target Through Measuring. They are full of flow charts and phrases such as `paradigm shift' and, one assumes, they are the least read books on earth.

Yet these user-unfriendly business books are becoming increasingly rare. The big money is to be made from management self-help books; the dumber the better. These books talk to the manager as a human being rather than as bean counter or strategy setter. They hold out the promise that if only he gets in touch with his feelings, the world will be his oyster.

I have opened at random Making a Life, a new book by an ex-professor at Harvard Business School. 'First you need to express your own truth and serve it through your work . . . Entitle yourself to your world's standing ovation,' it says.

Managers, on the whole, are sensible people of above average intelligence and it is a puzzle why this sort of writing has such a great appeal for them. It is tempting to view books such as Who Moved My Cheese? or Making a Life as managers' secret vice a kind of pornography for businessmen. (I say businessmen, as this sort of book is gen- erally written by men for men, and appears to have scant appeal to women.) Unfortu- nately, the analogy doesn't quite stack up. Pornography is a private, forbidden plea- sure, whereas managers reading these books will brag about it afterwards to any- one prepared to listen. A better reason is that male managers have been buttoned up for so long and have come to psychobabble so late in life that they have gone over- board. Not having been reared on a diet of the trite advice of Cosmopolitan, they are particularly susceptible to the fake wisdom of Who Moved My Cheese?

Another reason for the rip-roaring suc- cess of these books is that many of the old rules that ensured success in big compa- nies do not work any more, which means that everybody is scrabbling around in the hope of finding new ones.

Take the management evangelist and prolific author, Tom Peters. Peters under- stands better than most how to milk the uncertainties of the new generation of touchy-feely managers. One of his latest books is a volume called Brand You: Fifty Ways To Transform Yourself From An The government want us to find a cure for mid-term blues.' Employee Into A Brand That Shouts Distinc- tion, Commitment, and Passion!

This is a breathless, ungrammatical rant that claims the trick of lifelong success is to think of yourself as a brand, like a pack- et of cornflakes. 'The nub. I AM A COM- PANY! That's the ticket! As of when? NOW! At least ...in my head. The biggest hurdle to Brand You-ness is between your ears.' Brand You,' he says later on, `Grooves on selling and has a Compelling Sales Proposition!'

I was just about to drop the book into the special crate we have in the office for all unwanted volumes, when I realised that I had reached a similar conclusion myself, though I wouldn't have put it quite like that.

In my own way, I too have been grooving on selling. I realised a few months ago that the most sensible way of coping with this vast market for management books is not to marvel, but to add to it. And so I have rebranded myself — as an ersatz manage- ment guru. I realise that this is a bit of a turn-up for a north London girl with pre- cious little direct experience of business. However, for years I have been writing a column, giving managers a hard time for their love of fads, for their touching faith in the power of management consultants, for their jargon and all the rest of it. If manage- ment books were indeed pornography, I would place mine at the S & M end of the range. This time the analogy is more apt: the harder I tell managers off, the more they seem to enjoy it. There was one chap, the head of a leading oil company, who called me a semi-literate, ill-informed hack, but to him I reply that to say I have little business experience is not to say that I have no expe- rience of managing. In fact I have plenty: I am CEO of a thriving concern, complete with raging egos, conflicting agendas and power struggles of the sort to be found in any of the country's best-known board- rooms. This organisation is my family. And it is as good a testing ground as any for the- ories on how to motivate or how to lead or how to come out on top.

The sad conclusion from this daily and nightly struggle is that managing is actually rather hard graft. Pat theories do not work. You can re-engineer, empower, rebrand all you like, but in the end you still have your bunch of conflicting egos and all the prob- lems that go with them. Standing ovations will be hard to come by.

And there, Tom Peters, you have my Compelling Sales Proposition. That it is obvious in theory how to be a good manag- er. It is obvious we don't like change. It is obvious we work better if we enjoy our work. It is all common sense. But just you try doing it. That's another matter alto- gether. Mind you, it is easy-peasy to write about and read about (if you are sensible enough to keep it short, that is).

Lucy Kellaway is a columnist of the Financial Times. Sense and Nonsense in the Office is published by FT/Prentice Hall (£12.99).