Beep Beep: Competing in the Age of the Road Runner

In this amusing but hopelessly dated book, the authors use the age-old cartoon battle between the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote as the metaphor for what will and will not work in business in the next millennium. The message of Bell, a management consultant, and Harari, a consultant and professor at the University of San Francisco, is simple, clear and presented through interviews with successful businesspeople and through humorous descriptions of scenes from the Warner Bros. cartoon. The bottom line: management and workers must be fast-moving, innovative, flexible and constantly learning; otherwise, like Wile E. Coyote, they are doomed to eat the dust of more nimble competitors like the Road Runner. There is nothing wrong with either the authors' presentation or their message. The problem is that the advice will strike even the most casual reader of management ideas as old hat. After all, the concepts of team work, continuous learning and taking control of your work life have been around for most of the 1990s. Drawing on corporate synergies--the parent company of Warner Books owns the rights to both the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner characters--makes the message more fun to hear again, but the authors don't break any new ground. Illus. $100,000 ad/promo; radio satellite tour. (Feb.)