CatchFire

Pick a book at random from your library and read some of it. I have just found Peter McLaughlin's CatchFire: A 7-Step Program to Ignite Energy, Defuse Stress and Power Boost Your Career. Without the hand-written note on the inside cover, I would have had no idea how I came to own this book.

Since each of McLaughlin's seven steps seems as if it could have been written in a single paragraph, this book should have been released as a four-page newsletter, Kiplinger style. This is how management books remind me of "Saturday Night Live" films, where a single, five-minute segment is stretched into the shape of an eighty-minute movie, long past the point of snapping.

Let me write my own 7-step management tome right now:

1. Those who live well tend to manage well.
2. If you have personnel, you have personnel problems, whether you know it or not.
3. Don't close your door to strays. But do watch out for rabies.
4. Make salary parity and annual reviews a top priority, no matter the size of the company.
5. Tell your subordinates the top three ways that your department causes the company to lose money. Astonishingly, most of them will not have been aware of at least two of these ways.
6. Build your department by thinking in terms of job titles, not of individual talents. Fill job titles with talents, not the other way around.
7. Do not let female employees end meetings by crying. Bring tissues in advance if you have to. The tears might be fake, anyway.

So hey? Where is my royalty check?