It is interesting that none of the successful people in this book include 'reading books about success' as an essential requirement for reaching the top. There is plenty about luck, talent and determination but very little about sitting around reading about 'opportunity fields'. This sort of book has been around for a long time, usually written by an American called Karl J Hackenbacker who made a fortune from washing-machine valves in the Fifties and wanted to share his wisdom with everyone else. Now Edward de Bono, famous lateral thinker and inventor of irritating dinner-party games about dwarves in lifts and men hanging themselves from ice blocks in deserts, has come up with a new variant. It is of course slightly more highbrow, combining the 'Get-rich-quick' genre with the more recent complexities of management science. If you like words like strategy, focus, target, goal, feasibility, long-term-play, risk/reward ratio, provocation operation, opportunity building, and perceptual map then this is the book for you.

De Bono has provided plenty of this sort of prose as a framework for his quotations from successful people. When he thinks that these quotations are particularly important, they appear in big bold type. Thus Mark McCormack's attitude to having a meeting with someone is highlighted: 'I try to judge