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TRAVEL TIGHTWADS: If you or your employees are on the road a lot, Zwickey recommends a subscription to Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, a magazine whose bimonthly compilation of 20 money-saving tips is more than worth the price of admission. The July/August issue, for example, points out that if you're traveling in the United States, long-distance cell-phone calls are generally cheaper than hotel-room calls. The magazine also suggests eschewing those overpriced hotel vending machines situated by the dripping ice maker. Instead, scope out where employees buy their sodas and snacks and then follow suit. The 20 tips column has been a regular department in Budget Travel since 1998, and the magazine published a greatest-hits version of its top 300 tips in its September issue.

CLASSIC: Business books aren't meant to be lovable. They're certainly not meant to be poetic. But Lisa Guedea Carreño's pick for the "greatest business book ever" is both those things. Although Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace (Viking, 1998) sounds like a long-lost Douglas Adams manuscript, this work by former Hallmark executive Gordon MacKenzie "is as inspirational as it is off-the-wall," says Guedea Carreño.

"Hairs are never taken away, only added. Even frequent reorganizations have failed to remove hairs (people, sometimes; hairs, never). On the contrary, each new reorganization seems to add a whole new layer of hairs."

--GORDON MACKENZIE
from Orbiting the Giant Hairball

The hairball, Guedea Carreño explains, is a weirdly apt metaphor for the corporation. MacKenzie describes it as a "tangled, impenetrable mass" composed of millions of individual strands of business decisions, policies, practices, systems, guidelines, precedents, and "intricate patterns of effective behavior [that] have grown around the lessons of success and failure." The hairball's problem is that it is caught in an endless cycle of resynthesizing past successes instead of opening itself up to new thinking. Only by orbiting the hairball -- practicing "responsible creativity" while remaining within the gravitational pull of the corporation's mission -- can leaders and employees make a difference. "And then there's the pink Buddha and death masks and milk cans and high-tech peaches and the conference of angels," says Guedea Carreño gleefully. "I can't do the book justice. You just have to read it."

InfoPosse members are Genevieve Foskett, corporate librarian at Highsmith Inc.; Lisa Guedea Carreño, library director at Goshen College; Christine Klein, director of knowledge and information management at LifeCare Inc.; Jean Mayhew, director of information and learning at United Technologies Research Center; and Lisa Zwickey, senior research specialist at J.J. Keller & Associates.