Currently on The Business Shelf

By John Greenwald

Power to the People.

A little whimsy can be worth a thousand points of B-school jargon. In Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment (Harmony Books; 200 pages; $17.95), consultant William Byham uses knights, dragons and a machine that hurls people into the 12th dimension to spice his lively treatise on energizing workers. The point of the fable is to show how sharing power with workers can revitalize an entire company.

In Search of Trust.

What makes some companies so good to work for while others are so bad? Good companies, writes Robert Levering in A Great Place to Work (Random House; 312 pages; $18.95), instill a sense of trust that encourages everyone to pull together. Bad companies, which Levering says are far more common, undermine trust by manipulating workers and treating them as interchangeable parts. Based largely on interviews with executives of 20 widely admired companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Delta Air Lines, this feisty book includes a potshot-filled critique of leading U.S. management gurus.

A Question of Quality.

Under now retired chairman Donald Petersen, Ford became the hot U.S. automaker of the 1980s. In A Better Idea (Houghton Mifflin; 270 pages; $24.95), Petersen says much of the secret lay in enlisting teams of workers to improve the quality of Ford cars. Teams created the Taurus, and are now developing an all new Mustang, due by the end of 1993. In flat but serviceable prose, Petersen outlines the steps Ford took to set up and use its teams. "The whole employee involvement process," he declares, "springs from asking all your workers the simple question, 'What do you think?' "

Poetic Justice.

Forget In boxes, organizational charts and exhausting hours -- they are all symptoms of hidebound management. Thus declares Love and Profit (Morrow; 213 pages; $16.95), James Autry's provocative account of his philosophy as president of Meredith magazines. A skilled amateur poet, Autry fills his book with prose and verse reflections on the nature of business and the role of bosses and workers. He views management as a "helping profession" and a "sacred trust" whose job -- as the Army slogan puts it -- means encouraging workers to be all that they can be.

Prescription for Profits.

American industry is acutely ill because managers have lost sight of the importance of people, says Robert Rosen, author of The Healthy Company (Tarcher; 315 pages; $22.95). Rosen prescribes large doses of employee participation. Each chapter cites a principle of good health with tips for putting the precepts into practice. Rosen warns against across-the-board layoffs because "eliminating employees may not be the best way to cut costs."

Howdy, Partner.

First came the hard-charging captains of industry and then the hired-hand executives who still gave all the orders. But the new heroes of business are bosses and workers who view themselves as partners. So writes Charles Garfield in Second to None (Business One Irwin; 454 pages; $22.95), an account of such teamwork-based firms as Michigan's Steelcase and Maryland's Preston trucking. Garfield views these companies as the vanguard of a revolution that will turn top-down corporations into democratic workplaces.