The Sequel Syndrome

Reviews of seven business books. Includes follow-ups to three wildly successful best-sellers; two books about appealing to customers' dreams; and two classics you should re-read.

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Book Value

Are the follow-up works of big-name authors ever worthwhile?

• Living The Seven Habits by Stephen R. Covey (Simon & Schuster, 1999)

• The New Corporate Cultures by Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy (Perseus, 1999)

• The Dance Of Change by Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross, George Roth, and Bryan Smith (Doubleday/Currency, 1999)

Best-selling authors and gurus are under real pressure to create follow-up products that build on their franchise. Among business books, there have been few, if any, best-sellers as wildly successful as Stephen Covey's 1989 The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Naturally, Covey has produced numerous sequels in an effort to extend the Seven Habits brand, and they have done pretty well, too. The latest in the series is Living the Seven Habits: Stories of Courage and Inspiration.

For this book, Covey has used a brilliant method to prolong the life of his franchise: he lets his readers do it for him. This is a collection of stories from readers of Covey's earlier Seven Habits books, who reveal how the habits have changed their lives. Covey sandwiches most of the anecdotes between brief introductory setups and a few paragraphs of closing commentary. Some of the stories are quite moving: a minister accidentally shoots his pregnant wife, plummets into depression and withdraws, and then uses the Seven Habits to turn himself around. Others are predictable: the hard-driving chief operating officer who experiences a heart attack and uses the Seven Habits to seek better balance.

The newest book is not nearly as strong as the first in the series. Those who are unfamiliar with Covey will be much better off reading the original.

Allan Kennedy and Terrence Deal's 1982 Corporate Cultures had a tremendous influence on a whole generation of business owners and managers. Now, after 17 years, Kennedy and Deal are back with a sequel, The New Corporate Cultures. Business cultures still do exist, the authors argue, but as a result of downsizing, mergers, reengineering, and outsourcing, the predominant one in companies today is built on denial, fear, cynicism, self-interest, and distrust. The only hope is for companies to create a learning environment. A company that embraces "knowledge as its main corporate asset would create a work environment that cherished people eager to acquire knowledge," according to Kennedy and Deal. And it "would be a wonderful place to work, the kind of place every employee would be eager to return to day after day."

But the authors don't really explore ways to create such a place. When Corporate Cultures came out, it was fresh and compelling because the authors were treading new turf. Now they're observing that downsizing can wreak havoc on the employee psyche. That's hardly news.

Peter Senge's The Dance of Change, another follow-up title (to Senge's The Fifth Discipline), succeeds precisely where Kennedy and Deal's new work fails: it provides abundant hands-on advice on creating change within an organization, fostering real learning environments, and sustaining a positive culture. The book is designed as a full-service resource and is chock-full of mini-essays and suggestions for further reading.

The only sequels that work are the ones that are worthwhile even to people who haven't read the original. On that basis, The Dance of Change succeeds nicely.

Dream a little dream

• Selling Dreams by Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni (Simon & Schuster, 1999)

• The Dream Society by Rolf Jensen (McGraw-Hill, 1999)

Brace yourselves. the days of the information society are numbered. (What? Was I sleeping? Where'd it go?) Instead, welcome to the dawn of the dream society. It's what the future of business is all about, if we're to believe a growing number of books.

In Selling Dreams, Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni, the head of Ferrari North American Inc., argues that you must appeal to the dreams of your prospective buyers. Businesses, he believes, need to "learn how to create products and services designed and engineered to convey intense emotions." But the products he focuses on in his book are all dream products: Ferragamo shoes, Revlon cosmetics, Elle, his own Ferrari, Harley-Davidson, and Viagra. Try selling a no. 2 pencil with the same pizzazz that you can muster for a Harley.

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