Minding the Store: Great Writing About Business From Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge, The New Press, 299 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, August 2008, ISBN 9781595583550

Many of the best-selling business books of the last thirty years are not based on exemplar companies, Fortune 500 CEOs or academic breakthroughs. Instead, they are completely made up; stories fabricated to make a grand point about how business should be practiced. Business fiction clearly attracts large audiences given the success of books like The One Minute Manager and Who Moved My Cheese? The biggest problem with this subgenre is formulaic writing that leaves the reader wondering if they haven't already read this one before (or in some cases, many times before).

However, fiction can still be a wonderful and intriguing tool for teaching business. Joseph Badaracco proved this in his book, Questions of Character, which we reviewed for Jack Covert Selects in 2006 and chose as one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Based on a course Badaracco taught at Harvard Business School, Questions of Character uses literature to explore the difficult questions leaders often face.

Before Badaracco, Pulitizer Prize-winning author Robert Coles was using fiction to teach ethics at Harvard. The dean of the business school caught wind of his work and asked Coles to develop a class for his students. That successful seminar is now also available in book form: Minding the Store, edited with Albert LaFarge, a collection of fiction stories and excerpts that illuminate the ethical and philosophical aspects of business.

The editors divided Minding the Store into five parts. The first section is on "the hard sell," followed by life in the office and how business affects life at home. The final two parts cover failure and death. Not the typical agenda items for the weekly brown bag lunch, but then Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman) is not your typical field representative. From Flannery O'Connor to John Cheever to Vladimir Nabokov, this book features some of the best in literature, all of whom teach us a surprising amount about business through their insights into human nature.

And that is one of the results of reading good fiction; we become invested in the characters and wonder what we would do faced the same dilemmas. Minding the Store is a stimulating self-study course during which you will be challenged to construct the questions, as well as provide the answers. Some questions are clear and familiar, while others require deeper contemplation and personal resolution. Consider this your invitation to do some needed soul-searching, with these incredible stories as the guide.

Greater Than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership by Steve Farber, Doubleday, 170 pages, $19.95, Hardcover, March 2009, ISBN 9780385522618

Steve Farber is a master storyteller, and he uses this skill to teach us about business through his well-crafted tales. It's not uncommon these days to see business novels, fables or allegories, but what sets Farber's books apart from the rest are the vibrant characters he creates. I gravitated to a character named Edg in Farber's outstanding Radical Leap; you'll be just as drawn to Big Jeff, Plumeria Maple and Sucky Chucky (a high school nickname) in this new book, Greater Than Yourself.

Greater Than Yourself (GTY) is a simple idea, as many of the best ideas are. If we focus on helping people to become greater than ourselves, Farber teaches, we all receive rewards. The three core principles of GTY are: Expand Yourself, Give Yourself, and Replicate Yourself. These three seemingly simple concepts help lead us toward a reexamination of our relationships which, in turn, maximizes our own potential. Since stepping down as president of our company, I have taken on the title of Chief Mentor. This isn't just some title to have on my business cards. Instead, it reflects my philosophy that it is now my job to share what I've learned about the business of business books over the past 25 years. So I was particularly drawn to Give Yourself, which is about "philanthropizing" your life, creating and giving to a GTY project and investing in that relationship.

In Greater Than Yourself, Steve Farber (he is his own main character) buys a used guitar and, finding a charming note in the guitar case, he embarks on a journey to find the original owner of the guitar. Along the way, he learns about GTY through a chorus of interesting characters. For example, the author of the note is a woman named Cat, and she is a brilliant, well-respected leader of a fast-growing company—and also a heck of a guitar player in her spare time. She explains to Steve that:

GTY is really just a form of very personal, one-on-one philanthropy. It comes from the same deep impulse, except that you don't have to be rich to undertake it ... The rest of us can give our talents, time, knowledge, contacts—whatever resources we have—to other worthy people in our lives at work and at home.

As you take this GTY journey with Steve, you too will learn the value of being Greater Than Yourself. Greater Than Yourself is one of my favorite books of this year: it is about a subject I strongly believe in and the presentation is perfect. As you take this GTY journey with Steve, you too will learn the value of being Greater Than Yourself.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton, Pantheon Books, 320 Pages, $26.00, Hardcover, June 2009, ISBN 9780375424441

In 2006 I reviewed a collection of essays about transportation called Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee. A long-distance trucker, a crew pushing a barge on the river, and lobsters making the trek across country all populate that fine book, one of my picks for best of that year. What I liked about that book—its fine writing and a unique viewpoint—draws me to this book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Both authors have an innate ability to find the beauty in the ordinary. In the case of UK writer Alain de Botton, he uses his talent to show the good and the not-so-good in the work people do.

The people and jobs represented in this book are real, not the extraordinary or the extreme. It's just people doing their jobs. The use of photography throughout the book helps to reinforce the realism the author is aiming to convey through his reporting. And de Botton pulls no punches. In the first chapter, we discover that when tuna are caught, they must be killed quickly or the blood in their system will darken the flesh and reduce the value. The author follows the fishermen and then the transport of the fish through an amazing food distribution center in the supermarket. The featured occupations range from the aforementioned fishermen to a painter and a career counselor. Seeing these links appear before our eyes as we read is like seeing invisible ink become visible. We are suddenly smarter for what has been revealed to us.

Alain de Botton is not only a reporter, however. He studies and comments on the subject of work throughout the book. In the following passage, the author ruminates on how work has evolved over time and what role it plays in our personal fulfillment.

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most powerful feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their center; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative. Our choice of occupation is held to define our identity to the extent that the most insistent question we ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were but what they do, the assumption being that the route to a meaningful existence must invariable pass through the gates of remunerative employment.

This kind of insightful commentary found throughout the book will inspire you to reflect on how work—both the pleasures and the sorrows—defines you and, perhaps, will also remind you that almost everyone on this planet, no matter what it is they do, has something in common with one another—work.