Business Beyond the Box
John O’Keefe This book, written by successful businessman and international sportsman John O’Keefe, presents the basic thesis that there is no computer as powerful as the human mind. No computer, it explains, can envisage ‘step change’ but only process data fed into it. Yet people in business try to make their thought processes approximate to the workings of a computer – they sift data in order to extrapolate ideas for incremental improvement rather than boldly imagining step change possibilities and seeking to realise them. The contention is doubtless true in many instances and the book seeks to explain a methodology for helping people break out from their selfimposed shackles. This is ‘triangulation’, which takes three different elements – step change goals, know-how and creative thinking – and combines them to achieve a mutually reinforcing effect capable of turning high ambitions into real achievements. To emphasise the point, the book insists on using the word exclusively with a little triangle figure substituted for the letter ‘a’. That might seem a minor quibble but it quickly becomes rather irritating, as do many of the its other stylistic tricks. The same goes for its attempts to play with words as a means of getting its message across. Maybe there is a message underneath the all this surface clutter, but finding it becomes an increasingly arduous task.
Price £12.99, published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing

Leadership and management in the 21st century
Edited by Cary L Cooper Leading figures from industry and academia, the public sector, the professions and the media are gathered here to conduct a ‘systematic exploration’ of the changing trends in organisations and what this means for leaders and managers. There are many reasons, according to Prof Starbuck of New York University to question , the usefulness and validity of