Golden Rules Top management strategies of the past 20 years and what still works.

If this were 1977, Seth Godin might be sitting down with one ofhis 40 employees to coalign their goals according to the conceptsof management by objective. He might be rounding up YoyodyneEntertainment Inc.'s workers into quality circles. He might beusing lateral thinking to spur the creativity that drives theIrvington, New York, online game show production company.

Today, however, Yoyodyne's founder and president tells hispeople to "ready, fire, aim," as management guru TomPeters advised in 1994 in The Pursuit of Wow! (VintageBooks). He urges them to develop one-to-one relationships withcustomers, as Don Peppers and Martha Rogers suggested in The Oneto One Future (Doubleday) in 1993. And he asks them to beguerrillas, in the approach popularized by Jay Conrad Levinson in1984's Guerrilla Marketing (Houghton Mifflin).

"We run our business based on those three books," saysGodin. "Every single person who works here has read some orall of them. It's fundamentally changed the way we run ourbusiness."