She's the one: Even in the case of products that women don't consume, they are often the key decision-makers

Tom peters isn't so much a management thinker as an evangelist. He wants to convert people. Convert to his version of management, which is largely Me Inc. So, what does the former McKinsey consultant, who shot to fame in the early 80s with his In Search of Excellence, have to offer in this collection of four coat pocket-sized Essentials? If you've read some of his previous books like The Circle of Innovation, or Re-Imagine!, you don't need to bother with this quartet, because it is an adaptation of the latter book, which, in turn, was an extension of the former.

But if you haven't dug into Peters in any significant way, this combo pack is highly recommended. It has everything that Peters the management writer has come to be associated with: exclamation marks, colourful and innovative page design (a thing he took to after he shifted from Knopf to the current publisher), and an almost-garrulous and rambling style of writing. Each of the four booklets has a specific theme: Design (product and service), leadership, talent, and trends (essentially about women as the prime consumers). In the introduction, Peters explains what prompted him to come out with this abridged set. It was, in effect, a bid to help the reader reinvent herself in an age when outsourcing and New Economy's relentless march threatened to make her skills obsolete. "Summer 2005. I publish a series of four quick and to-the-point books... the Essentials. As in: Here are the essential things you must know... as you strive to act... in this unstable, up-tempo, outsourcing-addled, out-of-this-world age".

It's difficult, if not impossible, to take up all the four booklets in this short space, so let's look at what Peters has to say about leadership and women as consumers. First, leadership. If people tell you, Peters says, that the job of a leader is to transform, they are wrong. The leader's job is to "construct a context in which... Voyages of Mutual Discovery... can take place". Continuing with the same rant, he tells you 49 other things that leaders are supposed or not supposed to be. Another gem: Leaders are rarely the best performers. More: Leaders hang out with freaks. Good stuff, but not great.

TOM PETERS ESSENTIALS Dorling Kindersley, PP: 160, Price: Rs 307

Of the four, the booklet that marketers may want to pay the most heed to is the one on trends, co-authored with Martha Barletta, an expert on marketing to women and President/CEO of The TrendSight Group. Barletta's basic argument: Men and women are different; not better or worse, but just different. So the thing for the marketer to do would be to launch products and services designed especially for women, right? Wrong, says Barletta. "Don't do it. Don't paint the brand pink," is her advice. "For one thing," she explains, "women don't usually want different features from those that men want. For another thing, women will run away from a 'women's brand' just as fast as men." The reason, she points out, is that women look upon women's products as just a dumbed-down, but more expensive, version. "That's condescending. It's alienating," she writes.

No doubt, there are occasions when Peters goes overboard, but mostly he does a great job of goading you, the reader, into action. It's almost as if he's taunting you; change or roll over and play dead, he seems to be telling you. If you've been looking for a personal, portable guru, this pocket-sized Peters may just be it.

THE OFFSHORE NATION By Atul Vashistha and Avinash Vashistha Tata McGraw-Hill PP: 296 Price: Rs 750

History will remember the Offshore Nation (The Rise of Services Globalization reads the sub-title) as the first authoritative book (there have been others, but the less said about them, the better) targeted at companies seeking to offshore all or some of their processes in an effort to cut costs, improve quality and productivity, increase efficiencies, or achieve a combination of these objectives. From a purely marketing point of view, this book has a ready market. Offshoring is no longer the preserve of Fortune 100, even Fortune 500 corporations; it has emerged one of the things even mid-sized companies need to do to survive and thrive in the hyper-competitive 2000s. Atul and Avinash Vashista have the credentials to author a tome such as this; the second is the founder of neoIT, a consulting firm that sees itself as an offshore (rather offshoring) advisory; the first is its CEO. And rather than simply being a collation of case studies of companies that have successfully offshored work, The Offshore Nation serves as a how-to book of sorts, listing out, in great detail, the various processes a company would do well to go through before and as it offshores work. In the process, the writing sometimes lapses into dense and academic stuff of the kind that would fit better into a reference manual. Then, offshoring is serious business and this is a reference manual.

BUSINESS INNOVATION: LESSONS FROM GREAT COMPANIES By A.V. Vedpuriswar Vision Books PP: 488 Price: Rs 595

What makes great companies tick? The answer, if one were to analyse, would probably be that there is one thing that they do better than their competitors: they innovate. That's not just in terms of new products, but processes and entire business models. Toyota Motor employed lean manufacturing to astounding effect; Dell used direct selling and build-to-order techniques to stay #1 and, more importantly, profitable in a notoriously low-margin business; and Herb Kelleher's low-cost Southwest Airlines adopted a model so radically different that no other airline in the US has been able to replicate it successfully.

In Business Innovation, Vedpuriswar, Dean at the ICFAI Knowledge Centre in Hyderabad, makes a case for "business model innovaton", as against incremental innovations in processes or products. Most of what the author writes can be easily found in the text books that a typical MBA course prescribes, and five of the six case studies that he offers towards the end of the book are also well known. The only one that hasn't been studied in any depth, and interesting for that reason, is HDFC. Did you know, for instance, that HDFC has a "no-star" policy that creates a workplace of equals, or that it has a "no-firing" policy except where fraud or deception is involved?

The author, given the constraints of producing such a book from India, rehashes a whole lot of publicly available information, but then India Inc. would do well to listen to his key message, which is to focus on business model innovation. Because that's how "a company changes the rules of the game and begins to control the key levers of business".