March 10, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Reader contest
Here in the office, we get a large supply of business book review copies. While review copies are generally popular, business books are something of a drug on the market, and it's not hard to see why with some of them. No possible paradigm has gone unmined, no matter how silly. I wanted to write a parody of a business book catalogue, with titles like "The Management Secrets of the Carmelite Nuns", but sadly, some desperate soul was there before me -- there are a plethora of actual books purporting to mine the financial wisdom of our nation's religious orders for the alleged benefit of their hapless readers.
So instead, I'm sponsoring a couple of little contests, for your amusement:
1) Submit the silliest business book, with its description, that you can find on Amazon.
2) Submit the silliest imaginary business book you can think of, with the description that might accompany it on Amazon.
Here's my submission:
Make a killing in the market
The amazing investment secrets of America's most famous serial killers
Before he became a household name for his murderous exploits, Ted Bundy was a successful law student and aspiring entrepreneur with an eye for a hot stock. Now, for the first time, you can have access to his investment advice, along with John Wayne Gacy's tips on real estate management, Jeffrey Dahmer's advice for the beginning commodities trader, and so much more! All told, the author has collected the financial wisdom of 35 of our nation's top homicidal talent. If you want to make it big in the market, you need to hone your killer instinct -- and there's no better place than this book.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 10, 2004 1:00 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksMy favourite: What Would Machiavelli Do
Machiavellians may not get to heaven, but on earth they have a definite edge on the competition. In this pithy and discreetly vicious guide, Stanley Bing shows how the Florentine master statesman and political thinker would handle today's myriad corporate challenges, seize the future by the throat and make it cough up money, power, and superior office space. More than a road map to success, this hands-on guide will help anyone get what they want, whether or not they deserve it. So what exactly would Machiavelli do? Exploit himself only slightly less than he exploits others Be in love with his destiny For the most part, be a paranoid freak Cultivate a few well-loved enemies, yet have a couple of good friends too Acquire his neighbour Move forward like a great shark, eating as he goes. And much much more.
I would point out that "What Would Machiavelli Do" is quite a funny book, and meant to be tongue in cheek.
How about this:
The Management Secrets of Complete and Utter Failures
Success in business is sometimes knowing what not to do. Take these cases, in which the miserable outcomes of innumerable middle mangers become your negative bellwether to what should be done.
Or
Salieri's Guide to Immortality in Business
Antonio Salieri is buried in
Vienna, a fixture in the firmament of Human Medicority. Follow the advice of the best of average composers to learn the secrets of being forever forgotten in business.
The 16 Habits of Highly Dysfunctional Bosses
Learn the secrets of tyrants, passive-aggressives, narcissists and borderline personality disorders, and make it work for you.Have alcohol and other substance abuse problems be your weapon to creativity and fulfillment at work. Moreover, learn how backstabbing, theft of ideas, gamesmanship and just plain old being a jerk can elevate you to loftier planes.
Josef Stalin's Secrets of Entrepreneurial Success
Man of Steel, Uncle Joe Stalin shares the secrets that made him the most successful European dictator to survive the Second World War. Chapters include:
1) How to get that job you've always wanted by indimidation and assassination.
2) Cleaning House: Getting rid of upper and middle management without paying for lawsuits or unemployment benefits.
3) Friend or Foe: Why contracts with competitors might be worth less than you think.
4) Blank Checkists: How to leverage your competitor's R&D for great cost savings.
5) From my cold, dead fingers: etirement and the Two Envelope Solution.
-BF
Transform the Market
Business Lessons of Hot Dotcoms
The author distills ten principles from in-depth interviews with the CEOs of some of the hottest DotCom startups, including Pets.com, Flooz, and Netscape, WorldCom, and Northpoint Communications.
Management by Management Fad
Surfing the Zeitgest of Modern Business Management
The author shows how to get ahead by taking advantage of passing management fads. She advocates thoroughly learning the language of new management fads before your peers to impress higher management and seize promotions. She showcases strategies to extricate yourself from the fad before its failure blots your resume. Case studies include Matrix Management, Management by Walking Around, Total Quality Management, and Team-Based Management.
How to Invest Like The Builders of Stonehenge - Unlock the ancient power secrets of neolithic barbarians; learn how YOU can measure the investment cycle with new StonePower (TM) technology. (Megaliths not included.)
Work Will Make You Free: Logistical Secrets of Adolf Eichmann - Seven power secrets that will power your logistics power to the next level... GUARANTEED! Illustrations by Albert Speer.
How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success with Classical Electrodynamics: The Human Resources Success Secrets of James Clerk Maxwell - Tap the power insights of Maxwell's Equations to power your way to human resources success... TODAY!
Mount Hood Marketing: The Timeless Marketing Secrets of Sasquatch - Power your way into the collective unconscious with these proven success techniques. Expand your marketing footprint; use fleeting glimpses to get people talking; kill livestock to grab headlines.
There Once Was A Fellow Named Enis: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of Dirty Limericks - Ramp your limerick power to the next level by converting your daily power affirmations to naughty anapaestic tetrameter. Rocket your way to sales success with these thirteen power secrets. (Remaindered.)
Winning Through Intimidation
Management Secrets of Saddam Hussein
Ever wonder why coworkers fear the boss? It's not just because he's an evil bastard. He's worked to perfect techniques of demoralization and control, and you can too! Sure, the Borgias could put rivals into a hard cell, but that's no longer politically correct, so learn the methods that got Simon Cowle where he is today. Anyone can lead by example. Few can lead by producing sweaty trembling paranoia. Learn why Donald Trump can reduce an Ivy league educated entrepreneur to a mass of whining blubber with two words and why John Ashcroft has been able to keep left wingers under his thumb. The secrets of real leadership are at your command for a modest fee of $39.95 made out to Jane Galt at www.janegalt.net
All Existance Is Suffering
The Buddhist's Guide To Management
This guide to the wisdom of the Bhottisatva is an essential tool for the harried CEO concerned about his next board meeting. Instead of focusing on such materialistic artifice as 'profitability' and 'returns on investment', All Existance Is Suffering provides a more metaphysical guide to enlightened management. Profits are simply physical manifestation of corporate desires; and since desire is the source of all evil, the wise manager understands that the source to true financial virtue is to eliminate all assets. It is only by ridding one's company of all ties to the physical world that the company is able to achieve unity with the universe; let all troubles with clients and regulatory agencies wash over you like mist over the meadow.
WEHT Jane Galt and the Foreign Service? Is the dream still alive?
WEHT Jane Galt and the Foreign Service? Is the dream still alive?
If Aristotle Ran General Motors
by Tom Morris
Since its hardcover publication in 1997, If Aristotle Ran General Motors has been one of the year's most talked about books, not only in the United States but around the world, where it has been translated into many languages. Author Tom Morris has emerged as one of America's most popular motivational speakers, bringing his inspirational message of ancient wisdom in modern business to thousands of employees at major companies like AT&T and Merrill Lynch. In 1998 Morris will give more than 100 keynote speeches at corporate seminars to further establish If Aristotle Ran General Motors as a must-read for anyone doing business today.
I especially like the way the description completely fails to describe the book.
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving With Grace
by Gordon MacKenzie
Creativity is crucial to business success. But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity. Gordon McKenzie worked at Hallmark Cards for thirty years, many of which he spent inspiring his colleagues to slip the bonds of Corporate Normalcy and rise to orbit--to a mode of dreaming, daring and doing above and beyond the rubber-stamp confines of the administrative mind-set. In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full color, he shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius.
Obviously written by someone who has never cleaned up a hairball. (Hint: They're usually accompanied by vomit)
Crisis at Santa's Workshop : Using Facilitation to Get More Done in Less Time
by Richard Weaver (Author), John D. Farrell (Author)
Like any real-life organization, Santa's workshop must find a way to do more with less, in this case producing over 500 million presents each year! That calls for quite a production capability. Each year the demand rises and the workshop must ramp up production or face disappointed children. Production director Rune decides to use a radical approach. Known as the facilitation process, this strategy has three steps: take responsibility, focus on the work at hand, and improve working relationships. Crisis at Santa's Workshop is an engaging story that can be read on many different levels. Managers find a blueprint for change, while readers recognize their own working lives - and possibilities - in a classic tale of a group rallying to a cause and overcoming tremendous odds to achieve success.
Uhhhhh... okay.... I wish that one wasn't real.
Here's mine:
Pillows With Teeth
by Luce Enamel
Information is the food of any organization. How does the tooth fairy know which of the millions of pillows will actually have a tooth under them? Reaching under the wrong pillows will cost you money--and destroy your company's bite. In 32 short steps, learn how to chew your information carefully to cushion your business. Gnaw away at the competition and fluff up your bottom line. You'll learn which pillows have teeth--and which are nothing but feathers.
The Kitchen Sink, Everything Everyone Has Ever Written About in a Business Book, Or Thought of Writing About While Sitting on the Toilet. NEW! Bonus Chapter- The Martian Model: Find Your Key to Success on Olympus Mons!
A Face Even a Mother Couldn't Love
Your fast-track guide to success with the General Motors vehicle design team
by Eileen Over and Moore Büz
Ever looked at a General Motors concept vehicle and thought, "I could have done worse"? Do you harbor secret aspirations of designing a version of the Pontiac Aztec even the rental agencies won't want? Authors Over and Büz have written a comprehensive guide that can put you on your way to success as a GM automotive stylist. Every facet of the position is covered on a chapter-by-chapter basis, with each revealing secrets of the trade. Examples include "Today a Tupperware party special, tomorrow a vehicle body-cladding kit" and "0-blander-than-British-cooking in 5.3 seconds: Rushing the 2004 Pontiac GTO to market." Get your copy today!
Pushing Up Daisies and Piling Up Cash
Investment Strategies of the Dead
How often have panic, indecision, and money spent on life-sustaining goods and services been the downfall of your portfolio? How many times have you lost money by shifting investments back and forth, when a more stabile plan would have made been better off for you in the long run? This indispensible book will guide you through the financial secrets and philosophies of America's most overlooked and underrated investors: the deceased. Stop letting your fickle conscious thoughts and desire for food and oxygen distract you from meeting your full earning potential. Case studies of such wildly successful corpses as Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and the newest "heavenly earner," Robert Atkins, will prove that you don't need to be breathing to show breathtaking financial returns!
FFF: The Call of the Wild Investment Strategy
Don't just horde your savings, learn how a well-timed and well-aimed offensive investment can bring you big returns! Naturalist Charlene Mistberg spent 17 years in the wild Hombe forest in deepest Zimbanzia studying the feces hording tactics of the white-collared whiner monkeys. She noticed how the elite monkeys always had larger reserves of feces, the weapon of choice in both in-troop rivalries and in defensive actions against predators. Careful observation revealed their secret. A delicate balance of hording and targeted pre-emptive flinging at troopmates that always brought big returns for future use. She named this strategy FFF: Flinging Feces for the Future. It wasn't long before she realized the real world applications for her personal finances. Returning to New York with a paltry $1400, she put her theory into practice and became financially independent in less than six months! Now, she's ready to share her secrets with you! Learn her secrets and how you too can Fling Feces for the Future!!!
I keep coming up with great titles, but lousy jacket copy, so here's one of the titles, I just can't do more than this for the copy:
IF I TELL YOU, I'M GONNA HAVE TO KILL YOU: Investment strategies, management skills and motivational techniques of mob families and how they can work for you!
"Sell His Ass For Cigarettes: Leadership Insights From America's Toughest Prisons"
The author went from being a two-bit punk to the leader of a gang which took over the drug trade inside San Quentin, and uses an earthy style to share the secrets of his rise with the reader. Chapters are devoted to climbing the organization's hierarchy; persuading the former leader to resign his post and name the author as his successor; dealing with competitors; expanding market share; and rent-seeking and regulatory capture (the descriptions of bribing and intimidating prison guards are worth the price of the book). The author will be eligible for parole in March 2004.
"How to Lose $100,000,000 and Other Valuable Advice" by Royal Little
It's a real book by a conglomerate CEO from back in the 1950's. Thus the Dr. Evil sized sum of money.
"From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor" by Jerry Della Femina
The skinny on the advertising business. The title is an ad man's suggested catch phrase for a Japanese consumer company's campaign. It did not go over well.
Both books are available used through Amazon.
Any chance of you doing a piss-take of management fads, a la Lucy Kellaway in the FT? Go on. It'd be an easy gig.
SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF ASSET ALLOCATION
This refreshing look at investment strategies takes you on a sobering tour of common investment blunders, organized under the hilarious chapter headings of Gluttony, Lust, Avarice, Pride, Envy, Malice, and Sloth.
Franchising Secrets of Osama bin Laden
Learn how to make a killing in the market from a franchising leader. Subjects include:
1. Getting free press
2. Implementing the Underpants Gnome Strategy for prophet.
3. Recognising the killer application for your business
Selecting Management Guides to Ensure Success
There's a growing flood of management books on the market, and filtering through all the roughage to find the gems is growing to be a harder task by the day. This book will help unlock the secret so finding good management guides to ensure your personal success. Remember, all modern managers come straight out of books, so be a better manager than your coworkers by reading this tome. Buy "Selecting Management Guides to Ensure Success", the greatest work of the mind since Aristotle, and never be stuck with another over-hyped, useless management book that doesn't even make any comments about how to manage again.
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