Business writing therapy to deal with amusing but ultimately depressing reality

The natural progression for a newspaper columnist is to move from pithy 800-word essays to writing a book. Instead of starting to work out how to wind it all up after the first page break, keep going. But it turns out there's a bit more to writing a book than just adding more words. First, it needs to be about something.

For a business columnist, the obvious first choice would be a book about business. And the easiest of all business books to write is a 'How to' book about business.

There is an endless stream of such books getting published. Some are written by famous successful business folks. Some are written by people you have never heard of, whose chief success is the writing of a book about success. I admit I have not read a lot of these books, but I have looked over the shoulder of the people next to me on the plane and gained some insight.

The way to go about this is to pick a topic that has nothing to do with business such as Japanese sword-fighting, quantum physics or perhaps the behaviour of an interesting wild animal like a tiger. Then relate all the facts you can find on Wikipedia about this topic to business. Repeat yourself a bit, throw in a bit of spirituality, come up with loads of anecdotes and you're done.

'The tiger stalks its prey with a focused sense of purpose, but remains at peace and relaxed. His movements are slow and deliberate, but where he sees his opportunity he will strike with deadly force. So too in his performance review, Harry spoke with calm and determination, never hurrying. But he was quick to seize the opportunity when it arose, to speak of his key achievements,' for example.

The wonderful thing about this style of self-help book is that the onus is on the reader to adopt the strategy. If your career does not improve, it's not because thinking about tigers is not a slam-dunk recipe for success; it's because you didn't put the theory into practice properly. You didn't become the soul of the tiger or something like that. It's a bit the same with self-help nonsense books about healing. If your flu didn't go away, or your missing leg didn't grow back, it's because you didn't believe enough.

So that's one approach. Another approach is the shocking, reveal all, memoir. This is the style of book where you tell the world the truth about working in the marketing department. There aren't a lot of these about, because if you really did tell the truth about what happens every day at work, it really wouldn't be interesting enough for anyone to read. If you are an astronaut or rock star, sure, but if it's head of accounts or treasury, not really.