Success built to last by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery and Mark Thompson

Wharton School Publishing/Pearson, £14.99

Built to Last, co-authored by Jerry Porras with Jim Collins, and Good to Great, by Collins alone, were rigorously conducted investigations into why some companies succeed better than others in the same sector. They were grounded in years of comparative research and richly deserved their best-seller status.

This book is clearly calculated to capitalise on its predecessors, but it is not remotely in the same league. Its marketing pitch gives the game away: if the two fastest-growing sectors in business publishing in 2005 were popular psychology (23 per cent growth) and management (21 per cent), a book crossing both categories should hit the jackpot.

Unfortunately, the Porras/Collins methodology does not transfer in any meaningful way. Interviewing 300 assorted achievers from Nelson Mandela to Richard Branson in order to identify their success secrets does not produce quantifiable data, nor can personal development be compared as objectively as company results.

What one gets instead is page upon page of cliché-"love what you do", "harvest failures", "ordinary people doing extraordinary things that matter to them"-all framed in the anecdotal format invented 70 years ago by those godfathers of self-help, Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie.

The puzzle is how the academically elite Wharton business school [of the University of Pennsylvania] came to lend its imprint to this cut-and-paste job.