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 where he’s coming from’. As well as these very important quotations there are other comments from people like Robert Maxwell, lots of analysis by de Bono himself and charts of ‘Tactics’ at the end of every chapter for you to remember. (Unsurprisingly the first Tactic of the first chart suggests reading this book.)

Best of all are the diagrams. These are tremendously impressive with lots of large arrows splitting into smaller arrows and then going through dotted lines and circles that have ‘innovation’ written next to them or ‘patterns of perception’. Underneath the diagram is the point that they illustrate. My favourite is ‘You have to be willing to travel South to go North’. A black arrow heads North, meets an obstacle, turns South to go round it and then heads North again. How very true that is. It is repeated as a ‘Tactic’ later to make sure that we do not forget its importance.

And so it goes on. Most of the successful people say fairly obvious things. Mike Brearley reckons that ‘Captains have got to be able to stand back and not just be one of the boys’; Sir Terence Conran tells us that ‘Enthusiasm rubs off on people’; Hans Eysenck reveals that ‘I rely on my brain to come to the right decision for me’. Some of them say complex things which on close analysis are equally obvious. Sting says he is ‘extending the parameters of my expression’ which means he is trying to get work as an actor, and the businessman Charles Williams says he is ‘psychologically unhappy with unstructured situations’ which means he doesn’t like it when he doesn’t know what is going on. None of this is particularly inspiring, which de Bono claims, nor is it very enlightening about success. It is clear that neither the subjects of the book nor the author are very sure why they in particular should have been successful. There is a vague consensus about luck, talent and determination, but this is not enough to make the book more than an enlarged Reader’s Digest article. No amount of diagrams can turn it into a scientific treatise. Representing ‘Genetic Base’ and ‘Environment’ as squares and circles tells you much less than the fact that the very rich Malcolm Forbes had a father who was very rich.

De Bono himself says in one of his set of Tactics: ‘Be bold, be confident, be egocentric but do not expect me to tell you how’. This is exactly what people are going to expect when they buy the book, especially if they are what the press release calls ‘would-be winners’. Despite the fact that you receive the thoughts of David Bailey, Tony Jacklin, Len Murray, Virginia Wade, Harold Evans and others, not to mention de Bono himself, you are not going to be given the secret of success for £8.95. Considering the amount of verbiage that you have to get through to discover this, I would suggest that buying the book has a rather low risk/reward ratio.