Book 'Em

Gather 'round, kids. It's story time. Goldilocks on Management: 27 Revisionist Fairy Tales for Serious Managers (Amacom, $21.95) may be the only business book you read with an actual smile this year. How can you resist Gloria Gilbert Mayer and Thomas Mayer's "The Princess and the Pea," where a picky prince finds his mate via the "Princess Identification System" (i.e., 20 mattresses and a monogrammed pea) he purchases from a Hammacher Schlimmer catalog. The lesson? Verify credentials, of course.

The Mayers follow their slightly cheeky tales with real-world applications and stories, so you don't have to feel naughty because you're enjoying the read. And where else will you learn a lesson from the seven dwarves turning Snow White's glass coffin into an amusement park, or the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood's involuntary merger?

This article was originally published in the March 2000 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Book 'Em.