How To Read A Business Best-seller

What the hottest management writers can't tell you about the companies they profile.

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Easily the most thrilling race in the book trade at the moment is the Excellence Sweepstakes, named for that all-time great In Search of Excellence, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. Search came on the field in 1982 with an initial printing of 15,000 copies. A recent contender, The Winning Performance, by Donald K. Clifford Jr. and Richard E. Cavanagh, entered the race last November with a stupendous 150,000 copies. The difference measures the growing magnificence of the prize -- not only the book-buying dollars but the hearts and minds of America's business managers.

With so much at stake, it might be sensible to look more closely at what lies between the covers. For the fact is that many of the best-selling management writers on the market today are caught in a dilemma of divided responsibilities -- and it's not at all clear that their top priority is playing straight with the people who buy their books.

The problem begins with a fact that nobody would deny. Each of the entrants in the Excellence Sweepstakes either started out as a management consultant or (being no fool) soon became one after achieving bestsellerdom. And why not? Since management consultants are already in the business of selling advice privately, who not sell the same advice to the public?

The short answer is that when consultants become writers, they take on obligations to readers that may conflict with obligations to their clients -- future clients as well as past and present ones. The conflict may crop up in any number of ways, but it's almost always the reader who should beware. Books come and go (to libraries, where nobody pays to read them); consultancies can run on forever.

Look, for example, at Clifford and Cavanagh's Winning Performance. This book was in trouble from the start: it grew out of a McKinsey & Co. study commissioned by the American Business Conference, a quasi-honorific association of high-growth, midsize companies. Cavanagh is a principal at McKinsey; Clifford is retired from McKinsey and has his own consulting practice, Threshold Management Inc., which specializes in midsize companies. The authors have written, in effect, about their past and potential clients. This does not make for objectivity.

Consider this passage.

[Q]uality control at Perdue Farms consumes a vast amount of Frank Perdue's and his top management team's energies. Red-capped quality-control inspectors are found at very stage of chicken production. . . . Sixty-seven quality standards must be met. . . . Perdue representatives roam grocery stores, butcher shops, and supermarkets checking on their products. . . . And Frank Perdue, even to this day, reads and acts on daily quality and field reports.

Which is fine, as far as it goes. But there are two details the authors leave out of their account of quality control at Perdue Farms. They are not obscure details -- many people in the chicken business are aware of them -- but they are somewhat unpleasant. The first concerns those "representatives" roaming around the grocery stores and elsewhere. They're not just checking on the chickens, they're also inspecting their fellow employees -- making sure, for example, that truckers don't cluck away a lot of Perdue's time in gas stations. The second concerns one of the 67 quality standards Perdue's happy red-caps are supposed to watch out for, namely the yellowness of all those dead chickens. More on that in a moment.

Why are such details important for the reader to know? After all, a writer can't tell you everything. Don Clifford, when asked about the omissions, rose smoothly to the challenge. "Of course," he said, "the companies we write about are all afflicted with the sins humans are heir to -- treachery and so on. But our intent was not to focus on human frailties. That's what I object to in the popular press. It focuses on the negative. Well, I say to that, absolutely not! We are absolutely not going to write spice. We're going to write about the good things companies do, not the spicy things."

The trouble is that readers often need the spicy things, if only to judge for themselves the worth of the advice they're getting. Clifford and his partner want readers to conclude from Perdue's quality-control procedures that it's a good idea to practice what they call selective discipline in running a business. Now selective discipline may be a terrific management technique, but if it includes intense surveillance of employee behavior, it is also open to considerable controversy. That, one suspects, is why Clifford and Cavanagh neglected to mention it: controversial is not what the well-rounded consultant wants to be. If the authors had reported that Frank Perdue gets a "winning performance" out of his people partly through fear, it might or might not have changed our opinion of selective discipline. But it sure would have changed our opinion of Frank Perdue -- spiced up the old bird, so to speak.

A more serious omission is the yellowness standard that Perdue's chickens must meet, a function of the amount of xanthophylls added to the birds' feed. One of the major themes of this book is that winning performers win because they recognize that "the value of [a] product or service, not just its price, spells success." Now value is a notoriously slippery word: it needs an adjective to pin it down. In the case of chickens, "nutritious" might be appropriate; so might "aesthetic." (Who wants to eat a ghastly-looking chicken, no matter how nutritious?) Why then don't Clifford and Cavanagh tell the reader that one of the values, maybe even the principal one, that Perdue adds to his chickens is a matter of aesthetics -- that yummy yellow color? The reason, again, is that it might complicate the advice the authors want to give the reader. Perdue's triumph may be due less to recognizing "value" than to manipulating the customer's perception of value. That's worth saying, but in a marketing book, not one celebrating progressive human-resource management.

Clifford and Cavanagh by no means exhaust the ways consultants-turned-writers can get themselves or their readers into trouble. Look, for example, at this dizzying hall of mirrors that Rosabeth Moss Kanter builds for us in her 1983 best-seller The Change Masters. She's writing of a managerial innovation affecting one company's first-line production supervisors. The theory behind the innovation, Kanter notes casually, came from a book called Men and Women of the Corporation, which the executive in charge had recently read. The executive also enjoyed the "services," as Kanter puts is, "of an external consulting group, with Barry Stein and, later, Daniel Isenberg playing leading roles." Dizziness sets in when the reader figures out (from a close reading of the acknowledgements, perhaps) that Men and Women is Kanter's own book, that the "external consulting group" is her own consulting firm, and that Barry Stein is her husband. The "innovation," we're not surprised to learn from its godmother, appears to be working like a charm.

Short of taking a vow of commercial chastity, never to consult (or write) again, is there nothing these authors can do to get off the horns of their dilemma?

Tom Peters, the Excellence man himself, has shown one way. "It soon became apparent," he and co-author Nancy Austin wrote in A Passion for Excellence, "that there was a great hunger throughout the nation -- and the world, for that matter -- for the message of In Search of Excellence." In this sort of verbal atmosphere, typical of both of Peters's books, it is clear that Peters isn't really in the writing-and-consulting business at all: he is founding a church. Search was its Gospel, Passion its Acts of the Apostles, and a third volume, on the way, may be its Epistles of Paul. This being the case, Peters gets around the dilemma of readers versus clients by the simple rhetorical device of treating them both as potential converts. His "cases" thus become parables, fictions, what he himself calls "stories."

This is not to degrade them. On the contrary, "stories" have a truth all their own, often a far greater truth than anything a reader gets from merely accurate reporting. Peters is himself perfectly candid about this. "What I write doesn't meet the same sort of standards that [Robert] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein have to meet," he says, "and it troubles me that people might get the impression that these institutions I praise might be perfect from top to bottom. It worries me that people may put me in a Walter Cronkite role and assume I'm telling the whole story."

He needn't worry. The message of Excellence doesn't depend on real-world corroboration any more than folk sayings do, or political slogans, or moral maxims. It demands of the reader a different order of belief from that asked by its competitors. It deals in "truth," not advice -- the sort of truth you have to believe in to believe.