The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success

The scrappy spirit of Horatio Alger is alive and well in success guru Brian Tracy. He may not be a household name yet like his colleagues Warren Bennis and Anthony Robbins, but (his publisher tells us) he still lectures hundreds of thousands annually on personal and professional development, including top cats at IBM and Arthur Andersen. This, his latest of some 10 books (including the "bestseller" Maximum Achievement), is exactly what its title suggests--100 maxims and MOs everyone must learn and live by to make it big, broken down into the laws of Life, Success, Business, Leadership, Money, Selling, Negotiating, and Time Management. Each law is followed up by anecdotes and quotes through history, plus bulleted points on "How You Can Apply This Law Immediately," which provide welcome structure and practicality.

In fact, Tracy's 100 laws are so cheerily practical, such an astoundingly uncomplicated affirmation of good old American bootstrap self-determinism, they recall the days when Alger's fictional bootblacks and newsboys finally made it big through pluck, elbow grease, and wide-grinning high hopes alone. (And, consciously or not, Tracy does seem to reside in a boys' world: among the countless men of means he cites here--from Emerson, Twain, and Lincoln to Henry Ford, Sam Walton, and, uh, Jesus Christ--this reviewer counted a whopping two women.) At times, Tracy's laws read like a Rotarian's shameless plug for capitalism ("The free market is the most efficient way for millions of people to have their needs met at the lowest possible cost"), an expression of Nietzschean contempt ("People are poor because they have not yet decided to become rich"), or, in a few instances, the kind of declaration that sets survivors of totalitarian regimes all a-tremble ("Power gravitates to the person who can use it most effectively to get the desired results"--yikes!).

That said, Tracy's pronouncements are more than usually correct; an unfailing boost to the indecisive, underconfident, or fatalistic soul ("You are completely responsible for everything you are and for everything you become and achieve"); and even occasionally astute, especially in matters of sales ("Top money-earners in sales are viewed as consultants, helpers, counselors, and advisors to their customers, not as salespeople"), where he had his own humble beginnings. You won't find anything especially new in Tracy's 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws, so think of it as all the best advice for improvement of your self, career, and business you'll ever read or hear, packed into one turbocharged go-getter's almanac. At the book's start, Tracy promises us that just by writing down 10 of our goals in the first-person present tense ("I actually AM too rich and too thin!"), eight will have come true in a year's time. I ask you: Did even your own mother ever have that much faith in you? --Timothy Murphy