as The Way to Wealth and Advice to a Young Tradesman.
Two and a half centuries later, the market for platitudes became so crowded that ever more exotic angles were required to catch the eye of airport browsers. In the words of Mike Fuller, author of Above the Bottom Line, ‘you have to have a shtick of some kind’. One promising approach, as the emphasis shifted from ‘management’ to ‘leadership’, was to seek out historical analogies, though the history usually turned out to be a mere promotional gimmick rather than a serious examination of past experience. The pioneer here was Wess Roberts (or Wess Roberts PhD as he styled himself, forgetting that non-medical ‘doctors’ who insist on drawing attention to their postgraduate qualification – Henry Kissinger in the US, Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland – always bring disaster in their wake: it’s tantamount to having the warning ‘This Man is Dangerous’ tattooed on one’s forehead). Roberts’s book The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun appeared in 1991 and soon found its way on to the bookshelves of every middle manager in the United States. Described as a ‘fantastic’ guide which ‘will help you make the most of your leadership potential’, it vouchsafed these truly fantastic discoveries: ‘You must have resilience to overcome personal misfortunes, discouragement, rejection and disappointment’; ‘When the consequences of your actions are too grim to bear, look for another option.’ Could anything be sillier? You bet: other authors have since come up with Gandhi: The Heart of an Executive, Confucius in the Boardroom, If Aristotle Ran General Motors, Make It So: Management Lessons from ‘Star Trek the Next Generation’, Elizabeth I CEO: Strategic Lessons in Leadership from the Woman Who Built an Empire and Moses: CEO. The ten commandments, we now learn, were the world’s first mission statement.
Recognising that not everyone wanted to be Donald Trump, or even Queen Elizabeth I, publishers extended their self-help lists to include more emollient titles on ‘personal growth’ – Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Road Less Travelled and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus – or even out-and-out fiction such as James Redfield’s novel The Celestine Prophecy, allegedly based on a manuscript revealing the secrets of the ancient Mayans, which sold five million copies in the United States alone. These might seem more New Age than New Economy, but it is instructive to note how often the two overlapped, as in Barrie Dolnick’s The Executive Mystic: Psychic Power Tools for Success or Paul Zane Pilzer’s bestseller, God Wants You to be Rich. When Anthony Robbins performed for a 14,000-strong crowd at a stadium in Dallas, the supporting speakers included John Gray, the man who inflicted Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus on the world. (Also on stage were country-music singer Trisha Yearwood, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman and General Norman Schwarzkopf: one is irresistibly reminded of early Beatles concerts featuring guest appearances by Freddie and the Dreamers, the Yardbirds and Rolf Harris.)
The juxtaposition of Robbins and Gray was all too congruous: there had long been a powerful spiritual impetus in American can-do literature. The popular nineteenth-century author Horatio Alger, who in novels such as Do and Dare and Strive and Succeed strove to persuade the nation that perseverance will always be rewarded, was a former Unitarian minister, defrocked for ‘unnatural familiarity with boys’. Norman Vincent Peale, a Methodist minister, became the most successful self-help guru since Dale Carnegie with The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which argued that Christians had a head-start in business: a typical anecdote concerned a saleswoman who told herself, ‘If God be for me, then I know that with God’s help I can sell vacuum cleaners.’ One of Peale’s modern counterparts, Stephen Covey, is a devout Mormon from Salt Lake City.
The marriage of mysticism and money-making reached its consummation in Deepak Chopra (or rather, Deepak Chopra MD), a Harvard-trained endocrinologist who turned to transcendental meditation (TM) and ayurvedic medicine in the early 1980s. He began marketing TM herbal cures – and indeed praised them in the Journal of the American Medical Association without mentioning that he was the sole shareholder in the distribution company. Chopra’s transformation from an obscure salesman of alternative potions to a national guru can be dated precisely to Monday 12 July 1993, when he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to promote his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. His revelation that ‘love is the ultimate truth’ was perfectly pitched for Oprah and her millions of fretful yet hopeful viewers. Within twenty-four hours of the broadcast 137,000 copies of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind had been ordered, and Chopra’s publishers – the deliciously named Harmony Books – were reprinting round the clock. By the end of the week there were 400,000 copies in circulation.
Since then he has published twenty-five books and issued at least 100 different audiotapes, videos and CD-ROMs, in which Eastern philosophy, Christian parables and even Arthurian legends are distilled into a bubble-bath for the soul. (One video offers ‘Lessons from the Teaching of Merlin’.) Like Covey and Robbins, he understands the magic allure of numbered bullet-points: hence titles such as The Seven Laws of Spiritual Success and Way of the Wizard: 20 Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want. In public performances, the soothing effect of his Hallmark-card ruminations –‘Everything I do is a divine moment of the eternal’, ‘You and I are nothing but saints in the making’ – is intensified by his mellifluous Anglo-Indian cadences and the mellow sitar riffs that often accompany them. Those who want the full-immersion experience can book in to the Chopra Centre for Weil-Being in La Jolla, California – dubbed ‘Shangri-La Jolla’ by the irreverent – where their ‘profound personal transformation can be customised for stays of 1–7 days’. The Centre grosses about $8 million a year, though Dr Chopra himself no longer attends to customers personally. ‘It wouldn’t be in the best interest of patients,’ a spokeswoman said, ‘because of his writing and speaking engagements.’ Perhaps wisely, Deepak Chopra MD ceased renewing his California medical licence after the annus mirabilis of 1993 and therefore cannot be held professionally accountable for the consequences of his advice. ‘I don’t consider myself a religious or spiritual leader,’ he has said. ‘I consider myself a writer who explains some of the ancient wisdom traditions in contemporary language.’ And for contemporary rewards, one might add: his speaking fee is about $25,000 per lecture. One corporate client, Atlantic Richfield Co., employed Chopra for almost a decade to teach employees how to find their inner space. ‘We were going through a lot of changes at the time,’ a company spokesman explained. ‘We needed to impress on people the need to look at the world differently.’
Harold Bloom argued in his 1992 book The American Religion that many Americans are essentially Gnostics, pre-Christian believers for whom salvation ‘cannot come through the community or the congregation, but is a one-on-one act of confrontation’. Clearly this does not apply to the more traditional churchgoing masses, but it suits solipsistic New Agers seeking the ‘inner self – and high-achieving materialists who like to think that fame and riches are no more than their due, reflecting the nobility of their souls. Chopra is happy to oblige: ‘People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual … Affluence is simply our natural state.’ Vain tycoons and holistic hippies alike can take comfort from Chopra’s flattery (‘You are inherently perfect’), and from his belief that the highest human condition is ‘the state of “I am”’: since we reap what we sow, both health and wealth are largely self-generated. Following this logic ad absurdum, he argues that ‘people grow old and die because they have seen other people grow old and die. Ageing is simply learned behaviour.’ Demi Moore was so impressed by this aperçu that she named him as her personal guru, announcing that ‘through his teachings I hope to live to a great age, even 130 years isn’t impossible’. Chopra himself, rather more cautiously, says that ‘I expect to live way beyond 100.’ Why the longevity formula failed to work for Princess Diana, with whom he lunched shortly before her death, remains a mystery.
Other famous admirers have included the former junk-bond king Michael Milken, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Debra Winger, Madonna, Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Donna Karan, who expressed her gratitude by supplying the dapper doctor with free designer suits. Alas, as Karan looked to the east her business went west: she was replaced as chief executive of her own company in the summer of 1997, under pressure from investors who feared that a growing obsession with herbs, healing crystals and reincarnation was blinding her to the