Asia To Munch On

The book's concept rests firmly on the three traditional pillars of wisdom on which dozens of successful business books repose. They are: create a new buzzword, ride the current fad, and take extreme stands. Naisbitt created a popular boardroom buzzword of the '80s with his Megatrends (eight million copies sold when anyone last bothered to count), so this book's got it all worked out as far as management soundbytes go. And the current fad is Asia: Wall Street's new Salome, promising ultimate bliss as she drops her veils one after the other. Naisbitt's book promises drooling western CEOs a peek at the hidden assets. As for the third pillar, flip through the tome, and you're constantly slugged by statements like: "The Cold War is over, and the overseas Chinese won it." Or "Japan was the star performer of the industrial world, but it is now the sick economy of Asia". Pow!

The book's structure too has much to offer. Its potential reader is the stressed-out global manager with a couple of hours free between two jet lags. So in the Introduction, the author provides a neat gist of the book with all its principal theses helpfully printed in bold typeface. Each chapter is on one of these theses, but since you know what they are all about, you needn't spend time going through every word. Instead, Naisbitt strews his chapters with boxes of tidily bulleted facts which put the one-line theses ("From Export-led Ô Consumer-driven", "From Villages Ô Supercities" et al) in perspective, and allow you to appear erudite at power lunches: "Jack, I ran some numbers and they are amazing. Tokyo, with 30 million people, is larger than 162 countries. Bangkok's population has tripled in size since 1961. Geewhiz!"

Call these infonuggets "factoids": uncontextualised data masquerading as hard facts. So who cares if in 50 words (page 61), Megatrends Asia spells Frooti as Frooty, refers to Bisleri as Bailley's, and replaces Alyque Padamsee's q with a g? And on its understanding of Asia, Megatrends... stresses that western and Asian logic structures and value systems are different, so Euro-American constructs will fail to reap long-term business profits in Asia, and then proceeds to explain the Asian mind through western assumptions. Readers interested in a management perspective on how people across the planet differ from one another in their values and attitudes would do well to read Riding The Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars.

Besides providing an impressively logical and lucid analysis of cultural differences based on first-hand research (asagainst basing it on news clippings like Naisbitt), Trompenaars' book militates against the typical management bestseller which aims at providing instant panaceas to harried managers. Writes Trompenaars: "Reading these books...creates a feeling of euphoria. 'If I follow these 10 commandments, I'll be the modern leader, the change master, the champion.' The...'onebest way' is a management fallacy that is dying a slow death." Never was a truer word spoken, but Trompenaars is a Dutchman with a difficult name. Another instance is the Frenchman Jean-Louise Kapferer, whose Strategic Brand Management is arguably the finest marketing book ever written, but has possibly sold less than one-hundredth of Trout and Ries' chatty superficial paperbacks.

The reason is simple. The manager, rushing to catch his flight, is faced with two books at the airport bookstore: one has a serious text bookish title by a non-Anglo-Saxon author, the other, written by an American, with a title like The Pursuit of Wow! Or Megatrends Asia. He takes the easy way out. How else do you explain the fact that of late , books on supposed management lessons from Attila the Hun, Winnie the Pooh and Star Trek have had very healthy sales? So how about Management lessons from The Zee Horror Show?